Vi Hart on Making Her Videos

How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make A Video About How To Make a Video... 

There's something about Vi Hart's recursive video about how she makes her videos which reminds me strongly of the Lispish ideal of having the Lisp interpreter available at write-time, compile-time and run-time.

RIP John McCarthy

John McCarthy has died.

Discussion on Lambda the Ultimate.

Someone else with the disease. :-)

How to write an interpreter in one day.

Lisp will be 50 in October.

Tim Burks talks about his language Nu (seems to be kind of Ruby-like behaviour with a Lisplike appearance (lack of syntax?)

Good references to Brad Cox's Planning the Software Industrial Revolution.

Cool. Didn't know this stuff before.

Sweet Expressions ... great idea for making S-Expressions more like other, more readable programming languages

without losing their power (such as generality, macros, quasiquoting, homoiconicity, and easily-manipulated program fragments).

Hat-tip Folknology

Paul Graham's Arc Challenge . Examples in Lisp, Smalltalk Seaside, Ruby, Perl and Python (using generators instead of continuations)

And an Erlang response.

Next installment of the must-read series on FogCreek's Wasabi.

Fascinating to see the problems they've come up against and the solutions. What Stefan calls "picture functions" sound close to GeekWeaver "blocks".

Joel Spolsky :

And your programmers are like, jeez louise, GMail is huge, we can’t port GMail to this stupid NewSDK. We’d have to change every line of code. Heck it’d be a complete rewrite; the whole programming model is upside down and recursive and the portable programming language has more parentheses than even Google can buy. The last line of almost every function consists of a string of 3,296 right parentheses. You have to buy a special editor to count them.

Spooky.

I mean, that wasn't exactly the whole GeekWeaver gameplan. But "high level" lisp-like language that compiles down into complex web-applications, is not so far off. I was thinking of Dojo as the Javascript library, PHP at the server, and Facebook itself (or Ning) as the layer at which applications can be glued together. So read with Marc Andreesen too.

It's the zeitgeist I tell ya'