Once again Naughty Dog Software has used Lisp to write their video games.
Here are the two blurbs where I heard about it:
I had held off posting this for a while in hopes that presentations materials would show up. They haven’t set; so I’m going to have to do some digging!
The home page for Ur-Scheme tells the tale of one mans journey implementing a compiler from a subset of Scheme to Assembly on Linux.
For folks interested in almost totally pure functional programs, here is a teaser:
It contains relatively little mutation. Although almost every line of the compiler has “side effects” like outputting lines of assembly code, there are fairly few locations where the compiler’s internal state is mutated. I count 25 calls to set! and string-set! in the 1600 lines of code, including the standard library.
Getting the control key “back into the right spot” on PC keyboards is a goal shared between Emacs and UNIX folks. The following are a collection of links on how to do so (this list is sure to grow):
Addendum: 10/01/08
The Sysinternals solution is excellent, but it throws away caps lock. This was fine for me for a while, but believe it or not, now I need it back. As such, I now employ the solution found here.
Addendum: 1/11/11
This approach does not work on Windows 7 (I just started using Win7 this week).
KeyMapper works brilliantly though.
(via emacswiki)
Addendum: 2014-12-10
Coming back to Windows I found that KeyMapper quit working for me.
AutoHotkey seems to be doing the job of swapping:
Alt (Meta) - Enter doesn’t seem to work.
I’ll keep at it. Here is the config.
WheelUp::
Send {WheelDown}
Return
WheelDown::
Send {WheelUp}
Return
Capslock::Ctrl
LCtrl::CapsLock
Enter::RCtrl
RShift::Enter
The last time I spoke to a friend of mine who knows both Scheme and Common Lisp (among many other programming languages), his current language of choice was Python. More or less, he said that it just “feels right” (I need to pick his brain more on this).
Is Lisp the future of Python? Do Lispers gravitate towards Python? I’m not sure yet, but this paper aims to shed some light on both of those questions.
A member of the Book Club pointed us at this wonderful article on how to get the most out of learning as a group.
Addendum: 10/15/08
The link to the source material died, so I replaced it with another.
Clojure is a Lisp like language built especially to run on the JVM. After perusing the language rationale and features, it is pretty clear that anyone interested in multi-paradigm programming on the JVM would have a great time digging deeper in to Clojure!
For all of the programmers who lament the fact that code is not recognized as art, there is Piet.
Joking aside, once you get up to speed on stack based programming, this looks like a fun interpreter project. I am supposing that there are some very interesting opportunities on how to literally make your code “more beautiful”!
Addendum: 09/08/08
Here is a hello world program with a thorough walk-through and explanation of how it works.
Addendum: 12/28/08
Possible projects:
From Dan Bensen on comp.lang.lisp:
Lispers know tons of modern languages. We invent a new one every time we write another application.
PLT Scheme’s user interface library is called Mr Ed. It is used to provide DrScheme to thousands of computers running Windows, Mac OS, and UNIX. It “just works”, and does so well; it is a fine graphics toolkit. MrEd Designer aims to make Mr Ed even easier to use!
Addendum: 7/14/8:
Peter Ivanyi now maintains this application.
Addendum: 09/10/08:
MrEd Designer 2.1.2 is released; it now supports tab-panels.
Addendum: 09/20/08
In MrEd Designer 2.1.3:
At one time or another you have probably heard the claim made that since you can utilize closures while programming in Lisp, there is no need to utilize an object system. That claim is sort of a half-truth. While closures are the language construct that allow you to create objects, they certainly don’t provide you with all of the object oriented programming language features that you would expect. Instead, you need to implement those features yourself.
The question was posed on the PLT discussion list. Some very good points were made about the issues you must address when implementing such an object system yourself, along with a pointer detailing how the issues are addressed in PLT Scheme.