Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category

Hey Language Snobs: Don’t Pinch Pennies

Wednesday, June 4th, 2008

Programming language snobs are penny pinchers. That's a tough sentence to write for some that just finished holding a workshop to help people learn Lisp of all languages. Why would I make such a bold, inflammatory statement? (No, not to troll. Most of the criticisms in ...

Installing SBCL, Emacs, and SLIME on Windows XP

Friday, May 30th, 2008

My recent install guide for CLISP, Emacs, and SLIME on Windows XP was a big hit - it has had about 2000 hits and 5 sincere thanks in the comments (it even got praise from a troll!). In it I promised a similar guide for SBCL, and here it ...

Setting Up and Using Emacs InfoMode

Sunday, May 25th, 2008

Emacs has an ancient (predating hypertext), simple, powerful documentation program called Info. It's very difficult to find info about it online (try searching for "Info"), so here's my beginner's guide. Info is an output format for the Texinfo typesetting syntax. Texinfo is used for writing documentation that can be ...

Installing CLISP, Emacs, and SLIME on Windows XP

Friday, May 16th, 2008

Until this week, I had been putting off setting up a CL/Emacs/SLIME environment from scratch ever since I had trouble getting ASDF to work with Lispbox. Every time I tried, I ran into some will-sapping problem like needing to find a good Windows program for .tar.gz files, or finding ...

Music Operates Directly On Your Abstract Syntax Tree

Friday, May 9th, 2008

I mentioned music in each of the last two posts as a digitizable creation that people enjoy enough to pay for. So what is it about music that is so great? I've been asking myself this question for years, and now seems like the time to try and ...

Hacker vs Engineer – Know The Difference!

Thursday, March 6th, 2008

Some of the most commonly used terms are often the most misunderstood and least agreed upon. One example of this is the difference between a startup and a business. Now I'm no expert (having run neither of them), but I do read a lot and I pay $8 ...

Sleeping Too Much and Fighting With Emacs and ASDF

Friday, February 29th, 2008

So it has been a while since I wrote something useful. I have either an excuse or an explanation, (depending on how you value excuses). Two weekends ago, I got sick and, long story short, I got better but I had to sleep a lot to do it. ...

Public Beta Open For “Ultimate N00b SLIME/Emacs Cheat Sheet”

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

On this Valentine's Day, give the gift people really want - complex key chords! In other news, I've got fans! Well, at least one anyway. A lot of the feedback I've received on this site so far has been from experienced Lispers who appreciate my enthusiasm and contributions for new users. ...