Behold:
“The rolling element is a sphere a foot or so across, the upper part of which fits into a cage equipped with motors and drive-wheels. The rider sits on a saddle projecting up from this framework. Should he begin to topple, accelerometers detect the movement instantly, and the onboard microprocessor commands [...]
Here is a very simple Common Lisp compiler [1] of Nock, C. Yarvin’s elegant systems language.
;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;
; *************************** define reader macros ***************************
(eval-when (:load-toplevel :execute)
(defmacro char-macro (ch &body body)
`(set-macro-character ,ch #’(lambda (stream char)
(declare (ignore char)) ,@body)))
; define syntax of N-expression
(char-macro #\[
(reduce [...]
Dear Readers,
Not long ago, some of you submitted my writings to Hacker News. I recommend against doing this, if you value your reputation there.
The editors of Hacker News appear to have taken an active dislike to this site. I don’t care to hazard a guess as to why. They have begun deleting any link to [...]
The Nook, Barnes & Noble’s answer to Amazon’s Kindle, was greeted with fanfare for including a feature which allows users to “lend” a purchased book to anyone, with a guarantee of recovering it later. The first announcement I came across mentioned no other rules governing the lending process. My first thought was that [...]
Let’s take another look at the console. There are several boards inside, but this is the only one which deals in custom Symbolics protocols (as opposed to the widely-known intricacies of operating a black-and-white CRT.)
The rough annotations are my own. Click on the pictures for super-size (~10MB!) images.
Once again, the Phase Encoded Video decoder board:
A: [...]
The machine does indeed power up and run:
But this is not enough.
The console is a museum piece. While a Lisp Machine circa 1986 might last for a reasonably long time between repairs, a CRT of the same vintage likely will not. Moreover, it is a pain to have around, even if it were indestructible. Wouldn’t [...]
I find Clojure revolting.
It is the most explicit to date abandonment of the age-old Lispers’ Dream, “Lisp All The Way Down.” Clojure is the antithesis of the Lisp Machine. Instead of a crystalline pyramid of comprehensible mutually-interlocking concepts, behind every Clojure primitive there lurks Black Magic. The Clojure user who is missing some routine [...]
This light-hearted song/video mostly summarizes my opinions on existing systems.
The lyrics, for those (like myself) with only sporadic access to the Flash player.
From Richard Feynman’s The Character of Physical Law:
“It always bothers me that, according to the laws as we understand them today, it takes a computing machine an infinite number of logical operations to figure out what goes on in no matter how tiny a region of space, and no matter how tiny a region of [...]
