To round up this year I'm happy to report that Gary Cornell sent me this email to clarify the Apress position on the publication of On Lisp by Paul Graham:

Well as the publisher of Apress I thought I should weigh in. We will publish the book as soon as Paul Graham gives us the manuscript. The book isn't so much "cancelled" as postponed... We just don't know until when.

We want to publish it, trust me.

Gary Cornell

The Quick'n Dirty Guide for Building, Programming, and Hosting Your Own Debian LINUX, Tomcat and SISC Scheme Web Server in 30 Minutes and for 30 Dollars Without a Headache

We provide volume discounts, if you order more than three copies of Successful Lisp by email to orders@bookfix.com. Payments for email orders are processed via Paypal.

Successful Lisp : How to Understand and Use Common Lisp

Successful Lisp : How to Understand and Use Common Lisp

Unfortunately, [the On Lisp reprint] was canceled early in the production and I am not aware of any plan to publish that book.

Regards,
Stella Lim
Sales Assistant

• lispmeister.com ranks 7709
• lemonodor.com ranks 2848
• paulgraham.com ranks 334
• boingboing.net ranks 19

Successful Lisp is finally in print!

We are still waiting for the amazon.com index entry. In the US this is a manual process and might take a couple of days. Until then we will serve all orders via the direct order page of our printer.

The setup of our print on demand process is quite interesting. The actual location of the printing depends on the delivery address. If your order goes to a US address, the book gets printed in the US. If it goes to a European address it gets printed in the Netherlands. Australian orders get printed down under. It usually takes three days for an order to be delivered.

Still searching for a seasonal present for your favourite geek? Buy a copy of SL and a tshirt!

Now we're going to learn an incredibly powerful feature of LISP: Creating SPELs!

SPEL is short for "Semantic Program Enhancement Logic" and lets us create new behavior inside the world of our computer code that changes the LISP language at a fundamental level in order to customize its behavior for our needs- It's the part of LISP that looks most like magic.

Recently we inherited several big boxes (about 1 cubic meter!) of LEGO from the neighbor's boys downstairs. Playing LEGO with my kids got me back into it's powerful design space. When you ask good software designers about childhood influences they usually name two factors: LEGO and set theory (new math).

Some twenty years ago Peter Glaser was among the first who wrote [1,2] about the connection between LEGO and programming. He called it "Hirn-LEGO" which translates to "Brain-LEGO". I always thought "Gedanken-LEGO", as in Gedanken experiment, was more appropriate.

To me Lisp is the LEGO of programming languages:

• Both were invented during the 1950s.
• As the basic building material the list resembles the classic 8 stud brick of LEGO.
• The REPL makes programming as interactive as plugging red bricks onto the green baseplate.
• No syntactic sugar, just plug and play.
• Nothing is glued together forever. Anything can be changed even at runtime.
• You can use macros to add new specialized bricks to your vocabulary.

References:
[1] Glaser, Peter: [Chaos CD][HaBi 1]- Das BASIC-Gefühl - Vom Leben mit einem MicroComputer, 1985
[2] Glaser, Peter: The BASIC Feeling or Life with a (Micro) Computer, 1985
[3] Halfbakery: Lego Programming
[4] Forth - the LEGO of Programming Languages

• The Art of Doing Science and Engineering - Learning to Learn by Richard W. Hamming

  This book is intended to instill in the reader a style of thinking that will enhance his ability to function as a problem solver of complex technical issues.

  Hamming is simply amazing! The three chapters about artificial intelligence alone make it a very valuable ressource. Highly recommended.
  Amazon.com doesn't keep it in stock, but you can order it directly from www.routledge.com (search for "hamming").
• Curious Minds - How a Child Becomes a Scientist edited by John Brockman contains 27 essays by scientist about the question "What happened when you were a kid that led you to pursue a life in science?". A very inspiring book even for non-scientists.

I would like to thank David for his patience while we were figuring out how to get his book into print. I would also like to thank Cornelia for designing the beautiful stylized cons cell for the cover, Mary-Suzanne for creating the illustrations and Martin for his perseverance as the editor of Successful Lisp.

I'll have a drink now!

Hi,
Got an action shot for you there:
It is the olive green cons cell shirt [1] and as you can see, the car is pointing at me while the cdr is pointing at my girlfriend. So we are a dotted pair - Lisp is able to express everything. ;)
Nice shirt btw, nice cons cell and good quality.
Rene van Bevern
Pro-Linux.de

Avalon is a set of linguistic constructs designed to give programmers explicit control over transaction-based processing of atomic objects for fault-tolerant applications.

Writebacks/Comments are disabled for a while until I find a new solution to the comment spam problem. I'm tired of cleaning the pages every day. Please email any comments and I'll add them manually.

We are working on the final revision of Successful Lisp and it will be in print soon.

I met with Conrad Barsky while he was in Frankfurt. He's a very bright guy and we had lot's of fun talking about Lisp and programming in general. He'll move to New York soon.

I'll be attending the lisp-hh [1] [2] meeting on 28th of November. Hope to meet Edi Weitz there. We'll be discussing a new book project.

We will now do a careful check of the galley proof, add any last minute corrections, upload the new book block and after that we're in print!

• Key Puller: Remove key caps with ease.
• Extra Key Caps: Extra Control and Alt key caps that are sloped to fit different rows. Replace the Caps Lock key cap with a Ctrl key cap. Now the "Ctrl key is where god intended it to be, on the left hand side of A", as Jerry Pournelle wrote some years ago.

Update: Øystein Grøvlen posted a correction: The ClustRa Telecom Database: High Availability, High Throughput, and Real-Time Response is the correct Clustra paper.

• Micrographia by Robert Hooke; CD-ROM with hires scans of the original octavo edition. One of the most beautiful books ever created by the original mad hunchbacked scientist. [1]
• Longitude by Charles Sturridge (director), a DVD production adapting the book by Dava Sobel, where she tells the story of how 18th-century scientist and clockmaker William Harrison solved one of the most perplexing problems of history -- determining east-west location at sea..

This was taken at Montana Coffee Shop in Minneapolis where I was playing a set of music today... and since the portrait of John McCarthy is so uncanny, there was no need to explain the shirt to anyone in the audience.

Dave Roberts wrote an excellent article about Random Testing where he mentioned the Common Lisp test suite by Paul Dietz who quotes from a paper by William M. McKeeman in his blog:

Excellent testing can make you unpopular with almost everyone.

[UPDATE] A user sent in an update for the location of the above paper. It is now available here.

T-shirt update: We just made our first online sale! I hope we will get some action shots from customers wearing the t-shirts.

[US shop] [German shop]

All that said - cool! This is great. It's more fun toying with the real thing than watching a video of Alan Kay enjoying it all to himself :) I can't wait to see where this goes in the future.

We are thinking about selling a starter kit containing Successful Lisp, a CD with a working Common Lisp environment and a t-shirt to get people started with a smile. We are also going to do a hard cover edition, but that's mainly for the library market. I've created a beta release of the t-shirts to get some community feedback. Let me know what you think about the idea! [US shop] [German shop]

Lisplets are Java Servlets that forward their requests, and gather their response headers, using s-expressions over sockets. They enable easy integration of Common Lisp or Scheme into a Java-based web environment. Access your Lisp application logic from any servlet container, such as Tomcat, Resin, Jetty, JRun and many others.

Lisplets are released as open source under the Common Public License.

About twentythree years ago I read Brownshoes by Theodore Sturgeon. It's a story about an man who invents an energy generating device. He spends many sleepless nights agonizing about the question what to do with it and finally decides to bite the bullet: get a job, get a degree, get the patents for his Rotor and generally make sure it changes the world by creating a market for the device.

It takes a talent like Ted Sturgeon, to turn this simple plot into a emotionally engrossing story, that inspires young readers.This story isn't about how to build a perpetual motion machine. It's about how to succeed as an agent of change, how to become a hacker.

Brownshoes was part of Sturgeon Is Alive and Well: A Collection of Short Stories

This paper points out that for the spatial desktop metaphor to work as intended, it really needs scenery (distinctive appearance) in addition to the spatial data layout that we have now. The paper shows how suitable appearance can be automatically generated (using a scheme algorithm). User studies show dramatic improvment in file finding after only brief use.

Colophon

The manuscript of The Baroque Cycle was written by hand on 100% cotton paper using three different fountain pens: a Waterman Gentleman, a Rotring, and a Jorg Hysek. It was then transcribed, edited, formatted and printed using emacs and TeX. When it was totally finished, the TeX version of of the ms. was converted to Quark XPress format using an emacs LISP program written by the author. Some share of credit thus goes to the people who made the GNU/Linux operating system and to the originators of LISP.  Maps were produced by Nick Springer with useful input from Lisa Gold, who also organized the family trees and assisted in the preparation of the Dramatis Personae. The geometrical illustrations (Apollonius of Perga's conic sections and the woodcuts from Newton's Principia Mathematica) were prepared by Alvy Ray Smith, working from scans or photographs of old books.

As it turns out, the students who originally wrote the 6502 p-code interpreter were fairly inexperienced on the 6502 microprocessor chip. As a result of this inexperience, the p-code interpreter is not as optimal as it could be. If the 6502 interpreter were completely rewritten using better coding techniques an overall increase of 15-20% could be realized. That's almost as good as the 6809!

Why is this still relevant? Some might think it's a crazy idea that the DISASSEMBLE function ever made it into the language standard. I disagree. As Robert Pirsig tried to explain in his seminal book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values, only in understanding the inner workings of a machine can we start to understand the nature of quality. Because Pirsig wasn't a programmer himself, he couldn't just write something like: "The Vulcan mind-meld with the machine is at the center of good code."

The availability of DISASSEMBLE in the Common Lisp standard is a message: There shouldn't be anything between you and your machine. When driving a TVR or programming a Lisp Machine, you want to be in control.

Last weekend my best friend Peter finally married Natascha. Somehow I'm sure this two day event will be remembered as the mother of all weddings by all participants.

The wedding took place in Weinheim, a beautiful city with a 2800 year history. After church we followed the white Cadillac convertible to the restaurant Pfeffer und Salz (Pepper and Salt), owned by the father of the bride, where we had a spectacular party drinking fine wine and champagne, eating delicious food and dancing all night long.

yrk quotes an article titled Scheme vs. Common Lisp at Philip Greenspun's site. Delicious!

Finally, Gerry Sussman said "Of course, you can't expect Lisp to do something like that; Lisp can't do things like this. If you want to deal with massive data sets, you have to use C. It is sad but true." I said, "Gerry, I think this would run on an old 1 MIPS 3600 with 8 Mbytes of RAM. I'd just rewrite this in Common Lisp. The code would be cleaner because of the generic functions for sequences and I'll throw out my private sort function and just use the one built into Common Lisp." Sussman said "If that is true then the whole Scheme project has been a waste and I'll shut it down."

We'll be reviewing the completed drafts in a couple of days and I will be able to make sample chapters available online.

Similar to autoconf, but without the auto part, CoMa provides a uniform configuration mechanism for items. Intended to be used in component based development (buzz, buzz) where different software pieces are used in the context of more than one application or version of the same application, it provides a way to configure items and query, validate their configuration.

A special kind of item called kit acts as the descriptor for a whole product: it can check out the needed items and configure them to work together. At present it works best with HO-CVS, but it can get on with pure CVS, albeit with some loss of convenience.

CoMa is written and customized in Common Lisp.

The method uses pattern-discovery as its underlying tool and is another instance of a generic approach that has been the basis of previously successful solutions developed by our group to tackle problems in computational biology such as gene finding and protein annotation. Chung- Kwei can be trained very quickly; as new examples of SPAM become available, the system can re-train itself without interrupting the classification of incoming e-mail.

In order to get at you individually, I must talk in the first person. I have to get you to drop modesty and say to yourself, "Yes, I would like to do first-class work." Our society frowns on people who set out to do really good work. You're not supposed to; luck is supposed to descend on you and you do great things by chance. Well, that's a kind of dumb thing to say. I say, why shouldn't you set out to do something significant. You don't have to tell other people, but shouldn't you say to yourself, "Yes, I would like to do something significant."

find path-to-writeback-dir -type f -mtime +7 -exec chmod 444 {} \;

The images are amazing and strangely beautiful! (link via BoingBoing)

"The world is going genomic," Enriquez says. "If you do not perceive the possibilities in this shift, if you say no instead of yes, you will be left in the past. There will be whole societies who end up serving mai tais on the beach because they don't understand this."

Programmers are human beings, embedded in a w