Chisel

Concurrency isn’t a “nice layer over pthreads” - the most important thing is isolation - anything that mucks up isolation is a mistake.

— Joe Armstrong

god said so

Machete Promoted!

Machete receives top rating! The machete language has been rated five stars as the best programming language ever! Machete really is the next big little language. Mark Stock, famous language designer and hacker extraordinaire will soon be bringing out a new book about machete the hacking language that is sweeping the programming world. Slated to go on tour after the book's release, Mark had just this to say: "It's been a real whirlwind. Adopters everywhere are screaming with delight about this new found programming language."




with apologies to Edsger W. Dijkstra

Mark Stock's Road to Lisp -- Not

I, Mark Stock, do solemnly offer these my responses to The Road to Lisp Survey:

When did you first try Lisp seriously, and which Lisp family member was it?

I did not try Lisp seriously. I couldn't get any available family members to compile or run.


Many of us had multiple run-ins with Lisp before it "stuck". The "stick" date is of most interest, but you can share earlier encounters if you like.

What led you to try Lisp?

Someone once said that I should try Lisp. But, trying is lying. As Yoda says: "Do, or do not. There is no 'try.'"

What other languages have you been using most?

C, Basic, assembler, HyperTalk, machete

How far have you gotten in your study of Lisp?
I know this is hard to quantify. Just wing it.

I am still blocked by the sight of all of those brackets. Emacs makes me go totally numb.

What do you think of Lisp so far?

I like the meta-circular thing. I've always thought about code and data in the same bucket despite any rules to the contrary.

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Please delete all but one of these cross-referencing tags: *(Switch Date not yet)

rant: the HTML rant tag

No! I am not ranting. I swear. Me? Rant? No way! Wait a minute. I am ranting.

I am not sure that the HTML rant tag has anything to do with machete. Or, maybe the HTML rant tag will be the only product of the machete language. Anyhoo, while cruising the web for steampunk and of course whiling those time-consuming right turns, got Gigablasting neuromancer and bumped into the Sarcasm mark, as in <sarcasm>Oh really?</sarcasm>, which has lead me back to the HTML Rant tag.

<rant>Aaaaaaagh! It's already defined in urbandictionary.com. Oh well. There is nothing new to define. Which means there is only one way to go forward: go backwards. Get out the machete and start hacking out keywords.</rant>

In the words, or at least the sig, of Michael J. Mahon:

"The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."

Why be modular? Carving out a niche

Yes, we can carve the chair out of a block of wood. Our tool of choice is machete, so naturally carving might be a way of using this tool. But, machete is not actually about using the tool, machete is about intuition. The machete usually only comes out when there is so much real foliage blocking us from where we get to where we need to go.

Are we carving a chair? Why are we constructing a chair? Is constructing a chair a good of example of what we need to construct? Do we need to construct anything at all? Perhaps, we have everything that we need already. Perhaps, we need less. Perhaps, we have way too much just like when there is too much foliage and it's blocking us. Perhaps, it is time to use machete and hack out some code.

Let's get out of our comfortable armchairs

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Paris drives the monster truck atop flattened cars.  Beautiful happiness may be a perfectionist doing it wrong.