One critic, echoing the voices of thousands, asks: “Surely if Lisp makes a programmer N times more efficient, then it would be easy to study scientifically. Have there been any studies comparing productivity?” I wish I could reply with the immortal words of Babbage. But alas I cannot. Sadly, I can indeed “apprehend the kind […]
A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse. Talk of cultural problems, “the library question” (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation – one which is able to make sense not only of […]
As a child, I was quite fond of old-fashioned Lego bricks. One very endearing but rarely discussed property of such bricks is their durability, bordering on the indestructible. Almost any abuse inflicted on a Lego structure will, at worst, leave you with a pile of bricks entirely like the one you started with. Even the most […]
The modern high-level-language programmer thinks (if he is of the thinking kind) of low-level system architecture as a stubborn enemy, or, at best, a harsh and indifferent force of nature. Anyone who suggests that everyday desktop apps ought to be written directly in a CPU’s native instruction set is viewed as much the same kind […]
Historical note (Jan. 7, 2014) – This ancient post still gets several hundred to a thousand page views per month! And, unsurprisingly, the Clojure community still replies to the criticisms therein with… only insults. This is what comes of a product fundamentally brain-damaged at birth. I find Clojure revolting. It is the most explicit to […]
The image on the left is the original 1890s NYC grid of power and telegraph cables, built by a hodgepodge of competing wire-running firms. A blizzard blew all of it down, causing chaos. After this, the city decreed that all cables are to be buried and passed regulations governing how it is to be done. […]
Yossi Kreinin throws down the gauntlet to all those who believe that a CPU ought to be designed specifically around the needs of high-level languages: Do you think high-level languages would run fast if the stock hardware weren’t “brain-damaged”/”built to run C”/”a von Neumann machine (instead of some other wonderful thing)”? You do think so? […]
What follows is an essay which I wrote in a fit of rage at the state of current computer technology roughly a year ago. It is entirely unpolished, unedited, and probably contains quite a few words and concepts meaningful only to myself. I originally had no intention of ever making it public, but after reading […]
The aim of Loper is to build a sane computing environment on top of the ubiquitous yet nauseatingly flawed X86-64 architecture. I believe that it is possible to abstract away its most damning shortcomings, such as the lack of direct hardware support for capabilities, orthogonal persistence, type-checking, and garbage collection. However, wouldn’t it be nice if we were not […]
Loper should not be considered truly dead until I myself am dead and buried. Currently available computing systems are brain-damaged in such wholesale, unmitigable ways that I am driven back to the project again and again, despite the oceanic size and nearly certain futility of the task. Working full time and being back in school […]
