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Tag Archives: Lisp

SBCL test failures on ARM

For hacking/prototyping/fun purposes I have a few embedded systems laying around. For example, I have a couple of Raspberry Pi systems, one of the original Raspberry Pi model B boards and one of the new Raspberry Pi 2 model B boards. And on everything, I have the latest Steel Bank Common Lisp building. On my […]

Arc in a nutshell: It’s no Dylan (and that’s too bad)

What’s the point of [Arc][1]? Infix-syntax [Dylan][2] is a much, much better language, especially once you add in the changes and features from the [Dylan Design Notes][3] and the infix version (but keep the prefix syntax). Really, Dylan is pretty much the Ultimate Lisp in a lot of ways. Arc is essentially `(decr Scheme)` with […]

It’s not the dynamic dispatch!

Joel has decided to blame the use of dynamic dispatch for Ruby’s speed issues: Without knowing much about the implementation of Ruby, I would guess that the biggest issue is around late binding and especially duck typing, which prevents type inference or strong typing, which means that function calls will always be slow because you […]

Programming language terminology lesson: Closures

In reading Beyond Java by Bruce Tate, I saw the following: Java’s syntax lacks features like closures and code blocks (which let you pass a block of code as an argument). Argh! In the vast majority of languages that support them, a block is a closure! Blocks, closures, lambdas — they’re all just different words […]

Steve Yegge describes what’s wrong with Lisp

Steve Yegge, Lisp is Not an Acceptable Lisp: You’ve all read about the Road to Lisp. I was on it for a little over a year. It’s a great road, very enlightening, blah blah blah, but what they fail to mention is that Lisp isn’t the at the end of it. Lisp is just the […]