Fragments

An attempt to describe three well-known function calling conventions in terms of bindings.

I find the best way to think about this is to think in terms of bindings, rather than environments or frames, which are simply containers for bindings.

In 1990, Richard Gabriel gave a talk from which Jamie Zawinski later extracted a section called ‘worse is better’ which he distributed widely. It’s strange but, perhaps, interesting, how prescient this idea was.

In June 2017 I argued that people who voted for Trump were racists: I’m very unhappy with that conclusion.

The UK keeps its laws on vellum: this seems to be a ludicrously archaic thing to do: is it?

As card-carrying members of the liberal elite we have to understand why so many people are so cross. Obviously it is our fault: with our awful progressive views we have prospered at their expense and it is only natural that they should express their anger by supporting politicians who are explicitly racist and misogynistic. That’s just a natural reaction: the people we have oppressed so horribly aren’t actually racists and misogynists, no, they just support politicians who are. It’s all our fault¹.

Clarke’s third law is that

any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

It does not apply to organisations who want to intercept communications: if it’s claimed that they can do something which requires magic, then in fact they can’t do that.

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.