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New position at work. Lots of power in regards to tech stacks of my choice.
I feel like Neo.
First project was finished in a week using Clojure. A basic application that would automate the process of adding our students into a particular active directory system in which many other things happen at the same time including updates to pins and other shit as well as networking and wifi permissions. Works fast as fuuuuuuuuuck, the alternative existed(somewhat) in php and while there was nothing wrong other than speed I wanted to show the head of my department what i could do.
It was anticlimactic as fuck. I thought it was gonna take me longer. It fucking didn't and i am glad as shit. It is now working like an absolute powerhouse in its own environment and being monitored by the sys admins, they loved how easy it was to deploy and how well behaved it is.
The head of the department is impressed as fuck and the board of directors got a hold of it. Reason being that I am being displayed as some sort of wizard that used ancient alien tech in the 21st century.
Fuck yes, major win.
I also get to add Clojure to my resumee. Hod even said that if needed be they will rethink my salary to add the fact that i get to use this tech where no one else can.11 -
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"9 -
!rant
You knoe, my first insights into computer programming came out of spite. I thought windows to be garbage and wanted to blame someone other than myself for my machine constantly crashing. Thus I discovered programming and down the rabbit hole. But my interest in computer science came from videogames. Portal in particular. I found the idea of GlaDOS fascinating and thought that artificial intelligence would be something interesting to research. The web then gave me Lisp, and boy was the language different from all the other languages I went through. I remember feeling super excited when Racket, Common Lisp and eventually Clojure would help me discover many different ideas. Every time I work with reduce or maps or stuff like that in other languages I always thank languages such as Clojure for having me descipher different ways of manipulating data to get a result. To this day I feel sad whenever I find that my languages do not have the same constructs that Clojure has. I mention Clojure because it is my favorite flavor of Lisp. But one thing that always remains grest to me is firing up Emacs and plugin my code to Slime or Cider and see the repl pop up waiting for something to happen. This feeling is beautiful.
Please guys, if you have not tried it, do so! You might hate it at first or push it aside. But trust me, once you get it it will really change the way you think about programming in general. Try the great Clojure for the Brave and true, and go through the third chapter succesfully. If you do not like Lisp by them then no harm done! You would at least know that there are other options.
Now, here are some cool things:
For the standard implementation, try Common Lisp
For a more modern Scheme, try Racket or Guile
For targetting the JVM try Clojure (more akin to Common Lisp) or Kawa (scheme like)
For the python AST get Hy (pun totally intended)
For JS try Clojurescript
For emacs scripting try Emacs Lisp (has way too many disasdvantages but still relatively close to common lisp)
Honorific mention to more pure functional programming languages for Haskell, F#, Ocaml.
Also worth mentioning that Js , Ruby and Python have great functional constructs.
(println "you will not regret it!")2 -
Does somebody know how to send data to the PHP CGI executable directly and how to receive it (stdin/stdout)?
Or point me to a useful resource?
In a side project (just for fun) I try to implement the interface on NodeJS so I could process PHP through ExpressJS (long story).
I've been able to send and receive stuff, but the PHP CGI always tells me that I am "not allowed" to use this interface...
Docs/mailinglists seem reeeally old and don't want to go through the Apache source code 😅
Or does Node not have enough privileges for communicatig with PHP CGI exe?8 -
!dev
So as usual I received some call from telemarketer and I started from other perspective this time.
I asked how I can be sure that the person on the other side is telling the truth.
That pissed the telemarketer that started challenging me by reading my company data but I calmly responded that it doesn’t proof anything cause I don’t know anything about you - the person who are calling me.
I know who I am but how I can trust who you are ? You just provided me your name that I don’t know it’s true cause I have no methods to verify that.
That pissed telemarketer so much.
Some time ago before you put money in bank you know the banker. If someone was stealing this money you probably know from your police who is it and where he’s probably hiding.
The future we’re trying to go right now with this machine stuff that makes job for us is completely different.
We’re more and more separated from reality that is our planet dying. More and more animals and plants are dying, nobody cares about it.
Despite me working a lot with new tech I am more and more sceptic of how technology is shaping us. We sooner or later wont be able to shit without computer ( lots of us is probably already there bringing cellphones as companions for good nice shit rolling ).
Is it the future we want ?
The future where you need to beat computer to have contact with nice people. Cause I see it everywhere now. The technology is stupid and not perfect so lots of us is forced to align to this crap right now. Use the technology and beat the algorithms to connect with human. That’s the future we want ? Really ?
Some idiotic algorithms that are trying to tell us that this is what you need to watch ? This is what you need to eat ?
This is where you need to be ?
Take our time and turn it to view count slash likes and subscribes shit hole ?
The technology power show that everyone wants to buy but you won’t even use 10% of it’s capabilities cause it’s blocked by company that sells it ?
I’m more and more disappointed by this world.
Anyway Telemarketer didn’t want to admit that is alien robot who is trying to kill humans by selling me this machine so I hanged up cause I had nothing more interesting to say.
I think they will finally stop calling me.2
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