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This is an exceptional book. It's dark and funny, scary and enlightening. If you, like me, have been into software and startups for a while, you will enjoy this a lot.

After a grueling week in the Silicon Valley fast lane, burnt-out software engineer Nick Aubrey boards a "red-eye" flight to Boston and winds up seated next to a very disturbed man who claims to know the secret of Gulf War Disease. Over Utah, Nick's chance companion meets his dramatic demise—and the police suspect Nick of murder. Soon everybody wants a piece of Nick — from the Salt Lake City Airport police to the CIA, from billionaire venture capitalists and paranoid cybermilitiamen to end-of-the-millennium cultists and exotic foreign beauties. The only person who doesn't want a piece of Nick is his distant wife, a beautiful biologist with a secret or two of her own. In freeing himself from a web of murder, deceit, and double-crosses, Nick comes to learn that the key to the secret of Gulf War Syndrome resides in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Basel Switzerland, where scientists are frantically working on submicroscopic machines to rearrange human DNA. When their work is done, the Gulf War will look like child's play. Only Nick can stop them. But first he's going to have to find the Trojan Horse hidden in the Kali computer chip. He can't do that without the help of his friend Todd, and Todd's been in a coma for nearly half a dozen years.

Mikel also is the author of:

• Bosco, A simple framework for building Cocoa applications using OpenMCL.
• Clotho, the beginnings of an OSX Lisp IDE.
• Alpaca, programmable text editor.
• Hansa, the game of expanding trade leagues.

Every programming language has its share of complexities. C++ is certainly no exception. In fact, because C++ carries a heavy burden of legacy compatibility requirements with C, it may have (arguably) more than its share. This article describes a problem that I ran into while implementing the latest version of the OpenCM system that cost me several months and nearly led me to abandon a design path in a detrimental way.

Loom is a language and environment for constructing intelligent applications. The heart of Loom is a knowledge representation system (description logic) that is used to provide deductive support for the declarative portion of the Loom language. Declarative knowledge in Loom consists of definitions, rules, facts, and default rules. A deductive engine called a classifier utilizes forward-chaining, semantic unification and object-oriented truth maintainance technologies in order to compile the declarative knowledge into a network designed to efficiently support on-line deductive query processing.

The Loom system also implements a logic-based pattern matcher that drives a production rule facility and a pattern-directed method dispatching facility that supports the definition of object-oriented methods. The high degree of integration between Loom's declarative and procedural components permits programmers to utilize logic programming, production rule, and object-oriented programming paradigms in a single application. Loom can also be used as a deductive layer that overlays an ordinary CLOS network. In this mode, users can obtain many of the benefits of using Loom without impacting the function or performance of their CLOS-based applications.

Today we got our new tool working. It's a code generator written in Common Lisp. It generates Java source code for schema migration. We're moving all data out of a relational database into a modified version of Prevayler. This is mainly to ease schema evolution which happens quite frequently with our web applications. I would prefer to use something like AllegroStore, but alas it's not gonna happen within this company. Doesn't matter, our datasets are small enough to fit into RAM, so Prevayler is Good Enough(tm).

I'm watching Ghost in the Shell on a tiny screen. It's still a cool movie. Best AI themed manga ever. We're going to visit Rome tomorrow. That's going be a nice trip!

Ok, so I've finally succumbed and have decided to create yet another blog focusing on Lisp, the world's greatest programming language.

Well, what makes me so special? Well, for one thing, I'm getting a Lisp Machine. Yes, an honest-to-goodness, real Lisp Machine. A Symbolics XL1200, to be exact. I'll be getting it 2 weeks from today.

Why would I do such a crazy thing, as opposed to getting something much more practical, like a Powerbook? It's simple, I'm a Lisp addict. I've been involved with Lisp since I was a teenager, a long, long time ago. I'm embarrased to say that my first programming language was Basic, but my second one was Lisp, before college could rot my mind with Pascal.

Lisp is simply the most beautiful, sublime, and elegant language yet invented to express thoughts to a computer.

The lisp-cgi-utils is a software package for developing CGI scripts with Common Lisp. It implements a very basic HTTP/CGI interface (sending headers, getting GET/POST and environment variables) and offers tools for easier HTML generation with special support for handling HTML forms.

This software is licensed unter the LGPL.

Today I used the gift certificate of my first Amazon Associates earnings to buy a couple of DVDs. Real mojo! Jesus H. Christ in a chicken basket! That was a fifty dollar purchase. Now I'm a happy camper. Thank you everybody!

John Thingstad has a page with some games he implemented in Lisp. He is writing a book about Lisp games.

If I write games why don't I just use Java like everyone else seems to? Because programming should be fun!

Bouquet is a graph generation package that allows you to register graphs over various Lisp objects and generate graph description files, which can be later visualised using the Tulip package. Tulip clusters and properties are supported.

http://rss.pubsub.com/08/65/474cb80bf0ef2189cebe87edd0.xml

Currently the feed shows:

• del.icio.us/ - Planet Lisp
• Artima Agile Buzz - Back to the past
• Bit Banger - Bill de hora's software state of the union
• Artima Python Buzz - code snobs: smalltalk or lisp
• Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants - Back to the past

Update: I created a Link Stack and added it to the lefthand column. This stack should show references of lispmeister.com on other sites. You'll find a Topic Stack searching for the words "common lisp" below the Link Stack (both currently empty). This Stack idea is so cool!

TBNL is a toolkit for building dynamic websites with Common Lisp. It employs the popular Apache web server for the actual http communication between the server and the browser and it uses Marc Battyani's mod_lisp for the communication between Apache and the Lisp image.

TBNL provides facilities like automatic session handling (with and without cookies), logging to Apache's log files, customizable error handling, and easy access to GET and POST parameters sent by the client. It does not include functionality to programmatically generate HTML output. For this task you can use any library you like, e.g. (shameless self-plug) CL-WHO or HTML-TEMPLATE.

TBNL talks with Apache over a socket and uses Kevin Rosenberg's KMRCL library for this task. As sockets aren't part of the ANSI Standard TBNL isn't portable to all Common Lisp implementations but it should work with all Lisps KMRCL has been ported to (including at least CMUCL, SBCL, Allegro Common Lisp, and LispWorks.)

It comes with a BSD-style license so you can basically do with it whatever you want.

learning to walk, quickly - 0.2.1.

bknr is the short form for baikonour, the russian spacecraft launch platform. bknr is a software launch platform for LISP satellites. bknr has different facilities:

• an object datastore
• a template system
• a web framework
• images, blogs, billboards
• rss feeds for blogs, images and image categories
• aggregated rss feeds, grouped by subject, for example lisp

The sourcecode is available in our arch repository and can be browsed online

The document suggests enhancements to Common Lisp that modernize the language in light of developments since that last ANSI standardization round. These elements can be incorporated as changes to the:

• Language
• Suggested "yellow pages" that implementations or repositories may supply as libraries
• Experimental components intended to explore areas not yet stable enough for inclusion within the language proper or the suggested libraries.

I want to comment on your use of S-expressions, based on what I learned 
in my couple of years researching Lisp hygienic macro ideas and working 
on Dylan macros.  Summary: I learned that S-expressions are a bad idea.  
There are three different things wrong with them, none of which have 
anything to do with surface syntax.  Having as a convenient abbreviation 
a surface syntax different from the program representation that macros 
work on is a fine thing to do.

See more ...

Update: I've made Robert Floyd's 1978 Turing Award lecture "Paradigms of Programming" available here.

Donald E. Knuth wrote a moving obituary about Robert Floyd.

With AT&T Graphviz, you don’t figure out the graph, the program does. Using a simple file format called dot, just describe which nodes should connect to which other nodes. Then the sophisticated layout routines quickly render it into many different output formats.

Last Saturday they were shooting for a new Chrysler Crossfire campaign right in front of our house.

Update: Have a look at this (.wmv format!) hilarious BBC review of the Crossfire. (Thanx kanna)

IT Dreams is a collection of the stressed-out, chaotic and just plain strange manifestations of the IT industry's collective subconscious.

Avi said that lisp is a weird dialect of Smalltalk. Smalltalk and lisp is more productive than other languages. Use them as a competetive advantage.

On the web it doesn't matter what your application looks like - Squeak looks very weird. If you think web apps are weird to use - you should try writing them.

SD Devtalk: March 2004; Volume 5, Number 3

Lisp Lives!

No longer linked only to AI, the language is enjoying resurgence in a wide range of arenas.

Statement and answer on the SD West show floor.

Nostalgia hit when I saw Franz Lisp evangelists on the show floor at the SD West 2004 Expo sporting (got-lisp-p) black t-shirts with the simple answer, t, on the back. I thought Lisp was dead by association-at one time it was synonymous with AI, and we all know that sad tale of great expectations. But take another look! According to Sheng-Chuan Wu, Franz's Vice President of corporate development, the language has moved from research and development / academic / prototyping environments to commercial, revenue-generating applications. "Lisp is a good solution for lots of commercial applications," Wu says, "and its three to five times faster to develop applications in Lisp than in Java and C++. In the last 10 years, its become a general-purpose programming language used in many modern and most of the time, very complex, applications."

See more ...

Why is OCaml fast? Indeed, step back and ask is OCaml fast? How can we make programs faster? In this chapter we'll look at what actually happens when you compile your OCaml programs down to machine code. This will help in understanding why OCaml is not just a great language for programming, but is also a very fast language indeed. And it'll help you to help the compiler write better machine code for you. It's also (I believe anyway) a good thing for programmers to have some idea of what happens between you typing ocamlopt and getting a binary you can run.