Andrew Kravchuk lockie

Two Lisp History Stories

prog

Lisp, thanks to Scheme, is often associated with functional programming. However, as David Turner points out,

McCarthy (1978) records that LISP had assignment and goto before it had conditional expressions and recursion—it started as a version of FORTRAN I to which these latter were added.

LISP was not based on the lambda calculus, despite using the word “LAMBDA” to denote functions. At the time he invented LISP, McCarthy was aware of (Church 1941) but had not studied it. The theoretical model behind LISP was Kleene's theory of first order recursive functions [according a talk McCarthy gave, heard by Turner].

The ReadLine Wrapper (rlwrap) utility is actually a must have when you want to run SBCL from the command line, because by default, SBCL in the terminal:

doesn't offer symbol completion
doesn't offer a history of commands
doesn't even understand the arrow keys, left and right (they input [[[A instead), nor any default readline keybindings, the ones we find in bash et all: C-e, C-a, C-u, C-k, Alt-b, Alt-f etc.

We can actually fix this with rlwrap options.

Developer experience, libraries, performance… (2021/11)

I'll preface this with three things. 1. I prefer schemes over Common Lisps, and I prefer Racket of the Schemes. 2. There is more to it than the points I raise here. 3. I assume you have no previous experience with Lisp, and don't have a preference for Schemes over Common Lisp. With all that out of the way... I would say Common Lisp/SBCL. Let me explain

SBCL Is by far the most common of the CL implementations in 2021. It will be the easiest to find help for, easiest to find videos about, and many major open source CL projects are written using SBCL
Download a binary directly from the website http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html (even for M1 macs) to get up and running (easy to get started)
Great video for setting up Emacs + Slime + Quick Lisp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnWVu8VVDbI

Now as to why Common Lisp over Scheme

CUSTOM GAME ENGINES: A Small Study

A couple of weeks ago I played (and finished) A Plague Tale, a game by Asobo Studio. I was really captivated by the game, not only by the beautiful graphics but also by the story and the locations in the game. I decided to investigate a bit about the game tech and I was surprised to see it was developed with a custom engine by a relatively small studio. I know there are some companies using custom engines but it's very difficult to find a detailed market study with that kind of information curated and updated. So this article.

Nowadays lots of companies choose engines like Unreal or Unity for their games (or that's what lot of people think) because d

Testimonies

CL's compiler

The thing in CL I miss most doing Clojure as my day job? CL's compiler. I like having a compiler tell me at compile time about the mistakes I've made. Bogus arguments. Unreachable code because of unhandled exceptions, and so on. CL saves me round after round of bugs that in clojure aren't found until you run the code. If you test well, it's found when testing, if you don't it's found in production. "Clojure compiler" almost demands air quotes.

CL's optional but oh-so-useful model of type declarations is also infinitely more useful (to me) than Clojure's use of "spec", and instrumentation that happens only at test time because of the cost. Depending on the OPTIMIZE declarations, other type defs are a floor wax and dessert topping. Want checks for argument types? Lower optimizations. Want most efficient machine code? High optimizations.

/u/Decweb, March 2023 https://www.reddit.com/r/lisp/comments/11ttnxk/the_rise_fall_of_lisp_too_good_for_the_rest_of/jczpysp/

Rich Already Answered That!

A list of commonly asked questions, design decisions, reasons why Clojure is the way it is as they were answered directly by Rich (even when from many years ago, those answers are pretty much valid today!). Feel free to point friends and colleagues here next time they ask (again). Answers are pasted verbatim (I've made small adjustments for readibility, but never changed a sentence) from mailing lists, articles, chats.

How to use:

The link in the table of content jumps at the copy of the answer on this page.
The link on the answer itself points back at the original post.

Table of Content

How to convert private key to WIF

0. Overview

WIF = base58check encode ([version byte][private key][checksum])

version byte = 80 for mainnet, ef for testnet and regtest

checksum = first 4 bytes of double SHA256 of private key

	# git clone https://gitlab.com/embeddable-common-lisp/ecl.git
	# ecl for android x86_64

	# build host ecl
	./configure CFLAGS="-g -O2" LDFLAGS="-g -O2" --prefix=`pwd`/ecl-android-host --disable-c99complex && \
	make -j9 && \
	make install && \
	rm -r build && \
	export ECL_TO_RUN=`pwd`/ecl-android-host/bin/ecl

	(use json)
	(use posix)
	(use utils)

	(require-extension srfi-13)
	(require-extension srfi-18)
	(require-extension srfi-19)

	(define api-key '())
	(define token '())