Here’s a simple example of dealing with a naturally circular function definition.

Common Lisp is, I think, a remarkably pleasant language, despite what some people like to say. Here are two small deficiencies, both of which are understandable in terms of the history of CL, and both of which ultimately hurt naïve programmers working in CL.

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is horrifying. As well as the awfulness of what is happening to the people of Ukraine, Putin’s apparent irrationality is terrifying. What if he is not being irrational?

There are apocryphal reports that Apple M1 systems are not as fast as people have been led to believe for general-purpose programs. That’s unsurprising.

Many people would like to believe that the CV19 pandemic is over. Unfortunately viruses do not listen to what people want to believe: the CV19 pandemic is not over, and there is a significant possibility it may never be over. The way out is not to pretend that it is.

The idiot child god and where he will lead us.

It seems that my article about the existence in the Lisp community of rather noisy people who seem to enjoy complaining rather than fixing things has atracted some interest. Some things in it were unclear, and some other things seem to have been misinterpreted: here are some corrections and clarifications.

Bruce Schneier is cross that ‘crypto’ no longer means what he wants it to mean.

Someone asked about better Lisp IDEs on reddit. Such things would obviously be desirable. But the comments are entirely full the usual sad endless droning from people who need there always to be something preventing them from doing what they pretend to want to do, and are happy to invent such barriers where none really exist. comp.lang.lisp lives on in spirit if not in fact.

[The rest of this article is a lot ruder than the above and I’ve intentionally censored it from the various feeds. See also corrections and clarifications.]

People learning Lisp often try to learn how to write macros by taking an existing function they have written and turning it into a macro. This is a mistake: macros and functions serve different purposes and it is almost never useful to turn functions into macros, or macros into functions.