I’ve recently been writing some Emacs Lisp code to do some massaging of files. Quite apart from having forgotten how primitive elisp is, I hadn’t realised before how hostile dynamic scope was for macros in particular.

We’ve been fooling ourselves for thirty years. We believed that the awful toxins that defined society in our youths were, while not yet dead or even nearly dead, clearly dying.

A recent article in The Economist talks about a plausible attack on the financial system: If financial systems were hacked: Joker in the pack. I liked this article, although I think it was a little naïve in two ways.

On midsummer’s eve 2016 old people in the UK demonstrated that, by a significant majority, they are xenophobic leeches who are happy to suck the life out of their children and grandchildren, and have now found a way of continuing to do so even after they are dead.

Lots of people, even famous Lisp hackers, like to claim that ‘Python can be seen as a dialect of Lisp with “traditional” syntax’.

Being famous does not make them right.

I sometimes make the mistake of reading the letters pages of newspapers.

I wanted to see if I could write a mildly complicated macro in Racket without becoming too confused. I can, although I am not sure it is terribly idiomatic.

This is the third part of a series on writing macros in Racket for someone used to Common Lisp, although it is mostly independent of the previous parts. The previous parts are part one & part two.

Or: why password strength checkers are useless.

How long might this take, in the worst case?

Three approaches to solving problems on computers.