If there's one thing that irritates me about the pg-led Lisp renaissance it's the fascination with the Ur-Lisp. Rewriting that Ur-Li...

Good binary formats rock. Reading the ELF spec was quite eye-opening for me. Dalvik's DEX format is another nice one. Interestingly, D...

As usual, Jonathan Corbet does an admirable job of informing us on happenings in kernel land in his summaries of The 2010 Linux Storage and ...

The Axis of Eval is my second blog, after the venerable plans within plans within plans . (Yeah, there were others.) Both of these blogs ha...

Good rules are few and far between in the programming scene. The first time I heard of what I now call the No Paranoia Rule was in the foll...

I believe the preferable solution is typeclasses as record types, instances as records, scoped implicit parameters for propagating them arou...

I've been thinking about what it is that still sets Lisp apart from all other dynamic languages. I've come to three core principles,...

Great response to Ask HN: Do you use more than one programming language? Not only do I use multiple languages professionally, I don't kn...

Excellent article by Bryan Cantrill, Concurrency’s Shysters : [C]oncurrency is still being used to instill panic in the uninformed. This tim...

Ian Lance Taylor is working on split stacks . This will permit the stacks of gccgo goroutines, which are mapped to native threads, to start...

Efficient Method Dispatch in PCL by Gregor J. Kiczales and Luis H. Rodriguez Jr. is an all-out awesome yet compact paper about generic func...

I think the use of color in syntax is very interesting. I first heard of this idea in ColorForth . Sorting in ColorForth . Piet is awesome ...

total blank lines w/ nb, nc semi- preproc. file lines lines comments lines colons direct. --------+--------+--------+---...

Guess what's a goal for C# 5.0? Tadaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.... Compiler as a service . Which is code for eval . Anders Hejlsberg shows it off in ...

Cardelli and Wegner's On Understanding Types, Data Abstraction, and Polymorphism from 1985 is a treat . No wonder it has more than 2000...

One thing I've learned, now that I'm working on my third attempt at implementing an Acceptable Lisp™ (after an abandoned project yea...

In English, mental refers both to things involving the mind in general, as well as crazy in particular. I propose to use the word semantic ...

Outlining! 2D forms! App Inventor for Android is based on OpenBlocks , which looks very much like Scratch, but uses Kawa instead of Squeak....

Nice and thought-provoking comment from one markt on LtU : One of the things that stands out to me about APL, and CS in general is the pure...

(Sorry for this stupid post, I'll get back to the topic at another time.)

Complaining about parentheses in Lisp is like complaining about the heat in the kitchen—as Jamie Oliver said, the cocktail of hot oil, shar...

I just skimmed the C# 4.0 specification , and I'm quite fascinated by it. The spec itself is extremely well-written and readable, as fa...

I just had a good laugh reading this , so I thought I'd share: Reasons to design a programming language: All current languages are ter...