Advogato blog for tbmoore

30 May 2002

Thu, 30 May 2002 06:37:12 GMT

Let's see; lots has happened. I started my Common Lisp job in August. On the minus side, I'm the only survivor of that group. On the plus side, I've met and worked with some incredibly talented developers.

In December my wife and I had a son who remains the cutest baby ever.

I've done a lot of hacking on McCLIM, a free replacement for the Common Lisp CLIM user interface toolkit. It's been very difficult, and rewarding.

18 Jul 2001

Wed, 18 Jul 2001 22:11:46 GMT

I started telling people at work today that I'm leaving. I'm going to be joining a company where I'll be doing development in Common Lisp full time! Funny; in 1993 I thought I was one of the last people on the planet payed to work in Lisp. I now know that I was wrong, but still I never thought that 8 years later I'd be able to work in Lisp again for real. I've maintained all along that Common Lisp is a superior language for building large systems; let's hope I'm right :-)

26 Jun 2001

Tue, 26 Jun 2001 21:43:38 GMT

CMU Common Lisp foreign linkage 2, running on ariel.bricoworks.com Send questions and bug reports to your local CMU CL maintainer, or to cmucl-help@cons.org. and cmucl-imp@cons.org. respectively. Loaded subsystems: Python 1.0, target Intel x86 CLOS based on PCL version: September 16 92 PCL (f) *

This means that the guts of my shared library changes to CMUCL work; the system has successfully recompiled itself. Yay! That's been a long time coming. I've had to unravel mysterious parts of CMUCL as well as fix my own silly bugs.

My new code can't actually load shared libraries yet, but the hardest part, including low-level compiler changes, is done.

4 Jun 2001

Mon, 4 Jun 2001 17:01:16 GMT

I struggled for a good part of the week with rebuilding CMUCL with my invasive changes to better support shared libraries. I took a pretty big diversion into fixing defmacro, whose compile-time/load-time semantics were broken. Now it's time to start all over again on the original task!

15 May 2001

Tue, 15 May 2001 23:59:41 GMT

nmw:I wasn't talking about programming in Emacs Lisp, I was talking about using Emacs to write Common Lisp code and interact with a Common Lisp system. ilisp rocks.

Extended conses aren't going to happen. A two word data structure that's basic to the language would be transformed into a multiword structure... besides, compilers and codewalkers and such quickly transform the list-based source into a structure-based representation. If you really want properties associated with cons cells, you can do it with a hash table.

15 May 2001

Tue, 15 May 2001 16:33:56 GMT

lkcl: Lisp syntax won't be scary after 5-10 minutes of playing: it's incredibly regular. Emacs enables Lisp to fly off the fingertips. And, the all-consuming passion to learn a new language is not something to be scared of, it's to be embraced!

3 May 2001

Thu, 3 May 2001 07:24:48 GMT

Made the first net release of cparse, a Common Lisp program for parsing C header files and generating FFI definitions. Lucky Advogato readers get first dibs. I need to make an entry for it at Cliki. Now, however, I'm going to sleep.

30 Apr 2001

Mon, 30 Apr 2001 17:02:31 GMT

I've been doing lots of good hacking on cparse, a Lisp program for generating foreign function interface declarations from C header files. In my last entry I breezily stated that handling sizeof() would be easy. Hah!! Anyway, getting that all right turned up parts of the C grammer that I had "forgotten" to handle. So, after much ripping apart and putting things back together, the parser is in much better shape. It now processes all of Xlib.h except for stdarg "..." function arguments, which aren't supported in CMUCL anyway. Things really are looking good for a public release later this week.

Celebrated my 35th birthday yesterday. When I was a teenager I could never imagine being so old.

20 Apr 2001

Fri, 20 Apr 2001 17:08:03 GMT

Hacked some more on cparse, my Lisp program for parsing C headers and generating FFI declarations. I've been feeding it Xlib.h, which is a good, complicated test case. Turns out I forgot to parse sizeof(). Doh! It won't be hard to add as I already have the support in the C types code to figure out the size of everything.

Saw the best, funniest special on VH1 ever last night: a biography of Iggy Pop. Usually those things are so pompous that they suck incredibly, but in this case it was impossible for VH1 to overwhelm the wit and genius of Iggy himself. The ad for the rap compilation "Monster Booty" was an added bonus.

17 Apr 2001

Tue, 17 Apr 2001 22:35:29 GMT

olandgren: The best resources for CLOS beginners tend to be books on Common Lisp. Some well-recommended ones are Paul Graham's ANSI Common Lisp and On Lisp (though the latter is out of print), and Peter Norvig's Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. Once you've grokked the basics, it's essential that you check out The Art of the Metaobject Protocol; this is at once an exposition on the design principles of CLOS, the implementation of CLOS, and powerful design strategies that are enabled by CLOS. Enjoy!