Posts tagged computer

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Three approaches to solving problems on computers.

Fog computing is like cloud computing except that no-one can see what you are doing.

Do not eat the free lunch: it has probably been poisoned.