a repository of unfinished thoughts
TwitterFacebookGooglePinterestLinkedInYouTubeRSS

Fugu Talk

Category Archives: Lisp

Old Computer Books

Posted on by Posted in Lisp, Open Source

I’m conducting my spring cleaning and getting rid of programming books that are no relevant (goodbye J2ME). Garbage collecting, as it were. It’s interesting to see that my oldest books are still relevant (again, the GC analogy applies – older references tend to stick around, newer ones are more likely to be ephemeral). Thanks to Linux especially, but also to MacOSX, the GNU and X Windows stuff is still around (not so much Motif, but it has descendants in KDE, if I recall correctly). Lisp is still around, even though it’s not going as strong as I’d like (I wish I still had my copy of the original Lisp Machine Manual). My collection of Inside Macintosh books – OK, that’s nostalgia. And the Microsoft books? That’s just out of fear that I might have to look at some old code.

image

Marvin Minsky at Gadgetoff 2007

Posted on by Posted in Apple, Lisp, Programming, Science

The recent passing of John McCarthy brought to mind my sole encounter with one of his AI pioneer colleagues, Marvin Minsky. Although I hung around the MIT AI Lab a bit, I only talked to him while I was working as a sales rep at the MIT Microcomputer Center and he called up to get a quote on a Macintosh (this was the very first Mac model – we also had a very expensive Lisa in stock). After getting a price, he congenially asked me my name and then told me his. I was impressed.

Gauche Scheme

Posted on by Posted in Lisp, Open Source, YouTube

I’m one of those Lisp loyalists who goes on and on about how I did this and that in Lisp and why do we have to mess around with all these newfangled languages when we had all those features in Lisp way back when (see my dated whinging). But I’m not enough of a loyalist to actually stick with Lisp (unless you count a tiny bit of Emacs customization). I still have my copy of CLtL2, but it’s buried under a stack of books on Python, Ruby, C#, Java, Javascript, Actionscript….

Nevertheless, there are still some Lisp practitioners plugging away. For example a friend of mine, Shiro Kawai, has implemented Gauche Scheme, intended for system scripting and accompanied by a number of extensions, such as OpenGL bindings. This is intriguing – the first Lisp I learned was Scheme in the now defunct 6.001 course, then I learned Zetalisp and Symbolics Common Lisp on the Symbolics Lisp Machines. So when I moved on to Lucid and Franz Lisp on Sun workstations and Windows PC’s, the implementations seemed a) huge and b) somewhat removed from the OS. Meanwhile, with scripting languages like Perl, Python and Tcl showing up, I wondered why we couldn’t script in Lisp? (A decade later, I’m asking the same question about game scripting languages) The Gauche-GL extension also makes me think all those GLUT demos could be done in Gauche-GL

I don’t speak Japanese, but I’m sure Shiro explains the  possibilities better in this Google Talk.

Aquamacs and Unity

Posted on by Posted in Lisp, Open Source, Unity

I’m a long-time emacs user (beginning with Zmacs on the Symbolics Lisp Machines) and I’m still holding out, using XEmacs on Windows and Aquamacs on MacOSX. But with Unity, I haven’t tried changing the default editor, largely out of apathy, and also Unitron is adequate and has a nice auto-coloring feature for Unity functions.

However, one of the “Google Friday” projects at Unity is an Emacs mode for Unity Javascript, so I just had to try it out. First, I specified Aquamacs as my Unity editor:

Then I downloaded the elisp file from the blog article and placed it in my user Library/Preferences directory for Aquamacs.

Finally, I placed the loading code specified in the blog article into the Preferences.el file (shown in the same directory above). So far, looks good!