Eric at LispCast wrote an article about why PHP is so ridiculously dominant as a web language, when arguably more powerful languages like Common Lisp linger in obscurity.
I think the answer is pretty easy. In real life, practicality usually trumps everything else. Most programmers aren’t paid to revolutionize the world of computer science. […]

Via PerlMonks I found a couple of articles discussing in good detail some of the new features of Perl6.
Perl6 steals even more things from Common Lisp than Perl5 did: it has multimethods / multiple dispatch for example, which is a huge plus. Via this interview with Damian Conway we learn that Perl6 […]

Via the Clojure wiki I found a great page describing how you can use GNU screen and some Vim magic to let Vim play nicely with an interactive commandline program like a Common Lisp REPL, Ruby’s irb, or Python’s, well, python.
That page is a very stripped-down and simpler version of what Limp does for Vim+Lisp. […]

There are some good things about Java. The virtual machine has been refined for quite some time. The garbage collector is likely to perform well. The standard library has gone through many iterations and is very encompassing and complete and amazingly well-documented. The community is enormous. The language is as […]

Ten days ago I complained that there were no good Lisp equivalents of ruby-forum or perlmonks. It looks like someone went and made one. What good timing.
I hope it’s a success, and I hope it stays newb-friendly. The amount of fake watch and shoe spam on comp.lang.lisp has reached critical mass.
Speaking of […]

What’s the Common Lisp version of Perlmonks or Ruby-forum? I have yet to find it.
comp.lang.lisp is largely crap. 50% of the traffic on that list is spam about shoes and fake watches. The other half is equally split between:

People debating tiny, silly semantic points of the Common Lisp Hyperspec.
People stuck in the […]

I symlinked my .vimrc to my local mirror of my website so that every time I rsync it (which is pretty often) it’ll automatically update my the vimrc on this server. So that should be fun. I experiment with things in there all the time so at any given moment there are likely […]

The simple act of jamming lots of print statements into your code to output values to help with debugging turns out to be tedious once you do it a billion times. One problem is in Ruby code that looks like this contrived example:
arr.sort.map{|el| "’#{el}’"}.join("\n")
If you wanted to inspect your object right in the middle, […]

I found this Perl6 imaginary timeline hilarious. Sadly we’re in 2008 and I don’t think that blue line is quite as high as it was projected to be. Though it appears that development is still slowly chugging along. I still check up on Perl 6 once every six months or so. You […]

It’s been a while since I acquired PAIP. I can’t say I’ve read all of it over the past couple months, but I’ve read most of it.
The initial chapters that give an intro to Common Lisp seem largely useless to me. There are better books to introduce Common Lisp (especially now that we […]