Webremixed Articles for tags: lisp

Hans Hübner: Quicklisp - The upcoming solution to Common Lisp's "library problem"

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 21:01:00 GMT

We're all tired of hearing that Common Lisp is all nice, but it has a library problem. True, many of the open source libraries written in Common Lisp are half-baked, incomplete, unmaintained and tasteless. But this is true with libraries in all languages (think libwww-perl), so that can't be the real problem. The real problem, as I see it, is that until now, there was no universally good way of installing a library and all of its dependencies.

The existing, widely deployed solutions (asdf-install and clbuild) require external tools to work, depend on the availability of diverse servers in the internet, and do not have something like a central maintainer who ensures that things are always in basically working order. Also, these solutions are rather unportable, as they depend on external tools and a Unixish environment which is not available everywhere.

My personal solution to this problem, until now, was to have a Subversion repository that contains all the libraries that any of my projects need. Some of these came from release tarballs, some from other revision control repositories, and maintenance was manual. Whenever I started a new project, I brought some of those libraries up to date, coped with any (new) dependencies, lost backwards compatibility with my older projects etc. This kind of sucked, but it had the beauty that both development and deployment ended up being relatively easy. All that was required was a svn checkout from my repository, and I was all set on a new machine.

Recently, Zach Beane was fed up enough to do something about this: He created Quicklisp, a self-contained, centrally managed, cloud hosted Lisp library system which aims to run everywhere and provide users with a one-stop solution for the "library problem". Quicklisp is in an early alpha stage, but having tried it, I must say that I am pleased and impressed. Finally, Common Lisp can also become a glue language like Python and Perl.

I tried Quicklisp today because Twitter has notified me that basic http authentication for applications will no longer be supported. Instead, one is now supposed to use OAuth to authenticate requests sent to Twitter. This required my reaction.

About two years ago, I have written a small gateway program that forwards new postings to Planet Lisp to Twitter. At the time, I was rather frustrated with Common Lisp and thus took the gateway as an opportunity to try Clojure. Today, I looked at the source of the gateway again to find out what it would take to make it use OAuth instead of basic http authentication. As the gateway was the only program I have written in Clojure so far, and I was not really that eager to extend it to OAuth. I tried for a few minutes, but found that my old program did not run with the current Clojure version right away, so I would have to basically start setting up a Clojure development environment from scratch in order to be able to use an existing, open source OAuth library.

Instead, I thought I'd give Quicklisp a spin. After all, parsing some XML and sending HTTP requests are no big deal in Common Lisp either, and an OAuth library is available, too. With Quicklisp, all it should take was write some glue code to connect DRAKMA, CXML, cl-ppcre and cl-oauth. Installing the bunch should be a matter of loading quicklisp.lisp, then typing (ql:quickload `("drakma" "cxml" "cl-ppcre" "cl-oauth")) and watching the show scroll by.

And hey, it worked right away. I even embedded a web server in the gateway application so that it can be monitored by the system status monitors provided by my hosting provider. All in all, rewriting the thing in Common Lisp and deploying it took no longer than two hours, and the source is not significantly longer than the Clojure version either. Furthermore, the new gateway properly deals with non-ASCII characters. Embarrassingly, the Clojure gateway was buggy in that respect and never properly twittered the titles of my own blog posts. Thanks, Zach!

Zach Beane: International Lisp Conference 2010

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:26:12 GMT

I just registered for the International Lisp Conference 2010. It's October 19th-21st in Reno, Nevada, USA. I'll be wearing my Quicklisp shirt or my Save Lisp And Die shirt at least some of the time. If you see me, say hi! Hope to see you there!

Patrick Stein: Deadline approaching: in the Find the People, Lisp Programming Contest

Thu, 02 Sep 2010 01:02:53 GMT

If you haven’t started your entry for the TC Lisper’s Programming Contest, you’re not too late. The deadline is September 19th.

If you have started, post a comment here or there to let us know how it’s going!

Subs 1.1.6

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 18:49:26 GMT

Subs is a Scheme Lisp interpreter written in C++. The implementation is incomplete and naive, but aims to implement enough to be able to run every code sample in Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs.

Lispjobs: Akamai Technologies, Engineering Manager, Clojure, Cambridge, MA

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 20:20:00 GMT

Hi Will,

Mike McLaughlin writes:

[Akamai Technologies] has just opened a new Engineering Manager role in Cambridge, MA for our mobile team. The position will help lead a team of engineers working with Clojure. We really want to hire someone that will help act as an advocate and evangelist for the Clojure work we are doing. Interested candidates can apply online or email me a copy of their resume.

The job description is located here - https://jobs-akamai.icims.com/jobs/4316/job

Mike’s email is: mimclaug@akamai.com.

Zach Beane: code from gigamonkey

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:24:03 GMT

Peter Seibel (author of Practical Common Lisp and more) just pushed some of his CL code to github.

uni2ascii 4.15

Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:47:38 GMT

It can also convert between the escapes used for Unicode in languages such as Ada, C, Common Lisp, Java, Pascal, Perl, Postscript, Python, Scheme, and Tcl.

Steel Bank Common Lisp 1.0.42

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 23:22:27 GMT

Steel Bank Common Lisp is a development environment for Common Lisp, with excellent support for the ANSI standard: garbage collection, lexical closures, powerful macros, strong dynamic typing, incremental compilation, and the famous Common Lisp Object System .

Zach Beane: Synonym streams

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 14:09:40 GMT

Leave me a comment, please:

When was the last time you created a synonym stream? What was it for?

Zach Beane: An ASDF2 gotcha

Thu, 26 Aug 2010 19:29:41 GMT

I've collected several hundred CL projects for Quicklisp. Building them all can sometimes be a challenge. I'm committed to using ASDF2 with Quicklisp, and new ASDF2 semantics have triggered build failures in some projects.

Here's an example of something I encountered (and helped fix).

f2cl is a Fortran-to-CL library. It's been around for a really, really long time. Its source files look like "foo.l", "bar.l", etc. instead of the more common (and ASDF-expected) "foo.lisp", "bar.lisp", etc.

The system file looked like this: ;; f2cl asd file (defpackage #:f2cl-asd (:use :cl :asdf)) (in-package #:f2cl-asd) (defsystem f2cl :components ((:module src :components ((:file "f2cl0") (:file "f2cl1") (:file "f2cl2") (:file "f2cl3") (:file "f2cl4") (:file "f2cl5") (:file "f2cl6") (:file "f2cl7") #+cmu(:file "f2cl8") (:file "macros"))))) (defmethod asdf:source-file-type ((f cl-source-file) (s (eql (asdf:find-system 'f2cl)))) "l")

When I tried to build, I got this error: failed to find the TRUENAME of /home/xach/src/f2cl/src/f2cl0.lisp

Fortunately, the ASDF2 manual describes exactly this situation (under Pitfalls of the transition to ASDF 2):

The mechanism by which one customizes a system so that Lisp files may use a different extension from the default .lisp has changed. Previously, the pathname for a component was lazily computed when operating on a system, and you would (defmethod source-file-type ((component cl-source-file) (system (eql (find-system 'foo)))) (declare (ignorable component system)) "cl").

The solution suggested in the manual (under How do I create a system definition where all the source files have a .cl extension?) only works for ASDF2, though. Here's something that worked for f2cl, and that works on both "classic" ASDF and ASDF2: ;; f2cl asd file (defpackage #:f2cl-asd (:use :cl :asdf)) (in-package #:f2cl-asd) (defclass f2cl-cl-source-file (cl-source-file) ()) (defmethod source-file-type ((f f2cl-cl-source-file) (m module)) "l") (defsystem f2cl :components ((:module src :default-component-class f2cl-cl-source-file :components ((:file "f2cl0") (:file "f2cl1") (:file "f2cl2") (:file "f2cl3") (:file "f2cl4") (:file "f2cl5") (:file "f2cl6") (:file "f2cl7") #+cmu(:file "f2cl8") (:file "macros")))))

Zach Beane: Lisp Cabinet

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 14:37:37 GMT

G. Christensen recently announced Lisp Cabinet, which is like Lispbox, but is more cabinety:

Lisp Cabinet is a set of configuration files, tools and utilites bundled with automated installer to deliver full-fledged Emacs based Lisp development environment for Microsoft Windows. Yes, there is Lispbox, and it works pretty well, but it lacks such important feature as ASDF-INSTALL. Futhermore, set of Lispbox Lisp implementaitons for Windows is quite limited, and you should download distinct verisions of Lispbox to use several Lisps simultaneously (but of course, you can configure them manually, if you need).

Go check it out.

François-René Rideau: Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday 2010-09-20 Hari Prashanth on Functional Data Structures for Typed Racket

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:35:09 GMT

A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday, September 20th 2010 at 1800 at NEU WVH 366. Hari Prashanth will speak about Functional Data Structures for Typed Racket.

Additionally, we will have two Lightning Talks. Speakers to be announced.

1 Hari Prashanth on Functional Data Structures for Typed Racket

Scheme provides excellent language support for programming in a functional style, but little in the way of library support. In this talk, I present our experience developing a comprehensive library of functional data structures in Typed Racket a typed variant of Racket, which allows us to maintain the type invariants of the original definitions.

Hari Prashanth is a Master's student at Northeastern University. He is working with Sam Tobin-Hochstadt for his thesis. His advisor is Matthias Felleisen. http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/krhari/

2 Lightning Talks

At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" each followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.

The slots for next meeting are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at fare at tunes.org.

3 Time and Location

The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday, September 20th 2010 at 1800 (6pm) at NEU WVH 366.

This is at Northeastern University, in the Computer Science building WVH (West Village H, see http://tmp.barzilay.org/wvh.jpg this picture) when you arrive from the T on Huntington Avenue near to Parker St (Green E line, stop at Northeastern Station, or possibly Museum of Fine Arts; you can also walk from Ruggles on the Orange line). As the number indicates, the room is on the third floor.

Northeastern maps and direction:
http://www.northeastern.edu/campusmap/maps.html

Many thanks go to Eli Barzilay for arranging for the room, and to Northeastern University for welcoming us.

4 No Dinner

We haven't been able to renew sponsorship from our usual partners for 2010, and are not planning to have after-meeting buffet anymore at this point. An informal group will probably gather to have dinner within walking distance of the venue.

5 More about the Meeting

The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on Monday, July 26th 2010 had about participants. Slava Pestov spoke about Factor: an interactive, dynamic, stack-based programming language. http://fare.livejournal.com/157280.html

We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html Volunteers to give Lightning Talks are also sought. http://fare.livejournal.com/143723.html

For more information, see our web site http://boston-lisp.org/ For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare at tunes.org.

Make clones of applications on the web using Packta s new Ruby book

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 07:31:19 GMT

Written by Chang Sau Sheong , this book provides a step-by-step explanation on how the social networking applications are designed and deployed to the Heroku cloud platform.

Lispjobs: Lisp Rules! Developer, Raleigh, North Carolina

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:37:12 GMT

LISP Rules Developer:

The successful applicant will have expertise that will allow them to collaborate in a technology rich environment. Additionally, the candidate will be a strong Lisp developer , with expert-level system background. Experience in the Health Insurance industry or other clinical background is preferred.

Stu Halloway on Clojure

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 18:30:22 GMT

Submitted by Andrew Glover on Fri, 08/20/2010 - 10:26. Briefly, Clojure is a "dialect of Lisp" and "predominantly a functional programming language" and thus, has a lot of smart people excited.

Zach Beane: ILC'2010 - Highlights, and 2nd Call for Papers

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:39:53 GMT

From: Jon L White
Subject: ILC'2010 - Highlights, and 2nd Call for Papers
Date: Thu, 19 Aug 2010 20:33:23 -0700
With the usual apologies to those who receive multiple copies of this...
INTERNATIONAL LISP CONFERENCE 2010 - HIGHLIGHTS and CALL for PAPERS
Important Dates:

Deadline for all submissions (FIRM): September 6, 2010
Early registration: September 16, 2010
Author notification: September 20, 2010
Final paper due (in electronic form): October 5, 2010
Conference: October 19-21, 2010
Invited Speakers:
We are proud to announce that, for the 2010 edition, we will have the following invited talks:

Lawrence Hunter
Building a Mind for Life

Jans Aasman
AllegroGraph and the Linked Open Data Cloud

Marc Feeley
Gambit Scheme: Inside Out

Peter Seibel
Common Lisp Standardization: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Don Syme
F#: Taking Succinct, Efficient, Typed Functional Programming into the Mainstream

Lowel Hawkinson
Lisp for Breakthrough Products

More information about speakers and talks is available at http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2010/speakers
Registration:
Rates for Early Registration (before or on September 16, 2010)
ALU member & ACM member $355 & ACM non member $390 & Student $150
ALU Individual Sponsors & ACM member $280 & ACM non-member $315 & Student n/a
non-member of ALU & ACM member $430 & ACM non-member $465 & Student $165
Rates for Late Registration (after September 16, 2010 & Onsite)
ALU member & ACM member $440 & ACM non member $485 & Student $185
ALU Individual Sponsors & ACM member $365 & ACM non-member $410 & Student n/a
non-member of ALU & ACM member $515 & ACM non-member $560 & Student $200
Due to colocation, registration must be done using ILC/SPLASH'10 unified registration forms available at http://splashcon.org
Please note that the registration page (page 3) has the option "SPLASH (OOPSLA/Onward!)" selected by default. If you are only planning to attend ILC, don't forget to deselect that option.
Travel and Accommodation:
SouthWest Airlines offers low fares into Reno but requires booking online at www.southwest.com
John Ascuaga's Nugget offers reduced rates for ILC participants. Please, visit http://splashcon.org to obtain the group code.
Scope:
Lisp is one of the greatest ideas from computer science and a major influence for almost all programming languages and for all sufficiently complex software applications.
The International Lisp Conference is a forum for the discussion of Lisp and, in particular, the design, implementation and application of any of the Lisp dialects. We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to participate.
We invite high quality submissions in all areas involving Lisp dialects and any other languages in the Lisp family, including, but not limited to, ACL2, AutoLisp, Clojure, Common Lisp, ECMAScript, Dylan, Emacs Lisp, ISLISP, Racket, Scheme, etc.
Topics may include any and all combinations of Lisp and:

Language design and implementation
Language critique
Language integration, inter-operation and deployment
Applications (especially commercial)
'Pearls' (of wisdom)
Experience reports and case studies
Reflection, meta-object protocols, meta-programming
Domain-specific languages
Programming paradigms and environments
Parallel and distributed computing
Software evolution
Theorem proving
Scientific computing
Data mining
Semantic web

We also encourage submissions about known ideas as long as they are presented in a new setting and/or in a highly elegant way.
Authors concerned about the appropriateness of a topic may communicate by electronic mail with the program chair prior to submission.
Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library (PENDING).
Papers must be written in English and submitted electronically at http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=ilc2010 in PDF or WORD format. Final submissions must not exceed 15 pages and need to use the ACM format, for which templates can be found at: http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.
Each paper should explain its contributions in both general and technical terms, identifying what has been accomplished, explaining why it is significant, and comparing it with previous work. Authors should strive to make their papers understandable to a broad audience. Each paper will be judged according to its significance, novelty, correctness, clarity, and elegance.
The official language of the conference is English. Some further information is available at the conference web site, with more details added later. See: http://www.international-lisp-conference.org
Technical Program:
Original submissions in all areas related to the conference themes are invited for the following categories.

Papers: Technical papers of up to 15 pages that describe original results or explain known ideas in new and elegant ways.

Demonstrations: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for demonstrations of tools, libraries, and applications.

Tutorials: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for in-depth presentations about topics of special interest for at least 90 minutes and up to 180 minutes.

Workshops: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for groups of people who intend to work on a focused topic for half a day.

Panel discussions: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for discussions about current themes. Panel discussion proposals must mention panel members who are willing to partake in a discussion.

Lightning talks: Abstracts of up to one page for talks to last for no more than 5 minutes.

Depending on the technical content, each submitted paper will be classified by the program committee as either a technical paper or as an experience paper; and authors will be informed about this classification. Note that all interesting submissions are considered valuable contributions to the success of the ILC series of conferences. As in past ILC's since 2007, accepted papers in both categories will be presented at the conference, included in the proceedings, and submitted to the ACM digital library.
Organizing Committee:

General Chair:
JonL White - The Ginger IceCream Factory of Palo Alto, ALU

Program Chair:
Antonio Leitao - Instituto Superior Tecnico/INESC-ID

Conference Treasurer:
Duane Rettig - Franz, Inc., ALU Director

Publicity Chair:
Daniel Herring - ALU Director

ALU Treasurer:
Rusty Johnson - TASC, Inc., ALU Director

Program Committee:

Antonio Leitao - Instituto Superior Tecnico/INESC-ID, Portugal
Alex Fukunaga - University of Tokyo, Japan
Charlotte Herzeel - Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Christophe Rhodes - Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
Didier Verna - EPITA Research and Development Laboratory, France
Duane Rettig - Franz, Inc., USA
Giuseppe Attardi - University of Pisa, Italy
Jeff Shrager - Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University, USA
Joe Marshall - Google, Inc., USA
Julian Padget - University of Bath, UK
Keith Corbett - Clozure Associates, USA
Kent Pitman - PTC, USA
Manuel Serrano - INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
Marc Feeley - University of Montreal, Canada
Marie Beurton-Aimar University of Bordeaux 1, France
Mark Stickel - SRI International, USA
Matthias Felleisen - Northeastern University, USA
Scott McKay - ITA Software, USA
Contacts:

Questions: ilc10-organizing-committee at alu.org

Program Chair: ilc2010 at easychair.org

For more information, see http://www.international-lisp-conference.org

Zach Beane: ANNC: MCLIDE 1.0b3 Mac IDE for SBCL

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 23:24:08 GMT

Here's an announcement from Terje Norderhaug:

MCLIDE 1.0b3 is now available for SBCL.
MCLIDE is a free open source Macintosh IDE for Lisp implementations on any platform, based on the mature IDE of Macintosh Common Lisp. You can use MCLIDE to develop on various lisp implementations whether they run on Mac, Windows or other operating systems, all from one development environment:
http://mclide.in-progress.com
The biggest news for the latest version of MCLIDE is support for the Clojure <clojure.org> lisp dialect, including the new Clojure 1.2 released earlier today. Now you can use the same GUI based lisp development environment for Clojure as with SBCL and other lisps.
Follow MCLIDE at <http://www.twitter.com/mclide>.
Terje Norderhaug

MULTILISP: a language for concurrent symbolic computation

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:13:05 GMT

ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst. , Vol. 7, No. 4. , pp. 501-538. Posts Export Abstract Multilisp is a version of the Lisp dialect Scheme extended with constructs for parallel execution.

Queue-based multi-processing LISP

Thu, 19 Aug 2010 12:13:04 GMT

In LFP '84: Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming , pp.

Blackthorn Starter Pack 2010-08-10

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 18:15:11 GMT

Start developing games using Blackthorn. Blackthorn Starter Pack gives you the possibility to start working with Blackthorn, a game engine written in Common Lisp.

Zach Beane: Quicklisp screencast

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 05:36:06 GMT

Want to see a video of Quicklisp, such as it is, in action? See the links in this tweet.

Vladimir Sedach: Input needed

Mon, 16 Aug 2010 00:52:00 GMT

Recently I've been doing a major cleanup/arson of CLiki . The cleanup effort was inspired by recurring comments on Hacker News of the form: "I didn't find Lisp libraries" or "I couldn't decide which libraries to use."

I would love for everyone to add a description of their Free Software Lisp libraries to CLiki with ASDF-install able tarballs and appropriate topic markers so libraries are easy to find and compare (maybe do it for cl-user.net first; I'm entertaining the idea of writing a scraper that would auto-generate new CLiki pages from cl-user.net entries). Currently this does not seem to be very realistic.

Instead I'm going to ask people who read Planet Lisp (where this blog is syndicated) to contribute to two specific tasks:

Go through the list of utilities packages on CLiki (add a CLiki entry with the *(utilities) tag for any utilities packages you know that aren't in the list) and add a description of what they contain to the package CLiki page.
Contribute to the Great Macro Debate CLiki page.

Right now there are almost two dozen "utility" CL packages offering everything from my-defun*$%# to map-nthcadadar (that's a joke, but only a slight exaggeration). It's quite hard to decide what to choose why. To me cl-utilities seems to be the most sane package, but it hasn't had development since 2006 (maybe it doesn't need it?). Disclaimer: I use kmrcl and Anaphora in my software.

The Great Macro Debate was a round-table at ILC 2009 that asked the unaskable: are macros evil?

To most post-Y2K Lisp programmers (like me) this seemed ridiculous. We grew up on Paul Graham's kool-aid . Macros are powerful, macros are awesome, they are special, don't use them when you can use a function, everything will be great.

But then all these experienced Lisp programmers came out at ILC and said that macros are bad for software maintenance. How can this be? In the absence of concrete examples, the cognitive dissonance was too great. The only defense mechanism was to tell yourself "bad programmers don't understand macros" and move on.

Two events changed my point of view. The first was encountering defclass* in a commercial project. The second was working with the TPD2 networking code and encountering my-defun (and you thought I was joking?). I came face-to-face with macros that made software maintenance hard.

The point of the Great Macro Debate CLiki page is to collect all relevant information as to why to write macros. That information will then get distilled into a sort of macro style writing document, which will contain examples and recommendations of how to write relevant macros, and what kinds of macros not to write, to make software maintenance easier.

Lispjobs: Lisp projects: Symbolic Space, NY and LA

Wed, 11 Aug 2010 17:37:21 GMT

Symbolic Space is hiring!

Symbolic Space is a technology company in NY and LA specializing in cad/cam applications. We use Common Lisp extensively and are committed to its use and development. Many of the tools you would be working on will be open-sourced in the near future.

Symbolic Space is looking for candidates to work on a project basis on the following:

Deftree: An MVC framework built on Hunchentoot with a hierarchical data model. This has some deep macrology that needs to be scrubbed and factored. JQuery experience is also helpful.
Codename Faust: A Common Lisp implemented in Qt. This is a nascent project that is critical to Symbolic Space’s future. Developers experienced with both Common Lisp and Qt/C++ are required.
Codename DCC: Digital asset generation technology for 3D content creation applications. Professional experience with Autodesk Maya or any CG industry experience is preferred.

Please send CVs, links to websites, or anything else you deem relevant to jakekozinn (at) gmail (dot) com. Thanks!

Andreas Fuchs: Huge life changes ahead.

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 22:09:39 GMT

In October, I will be moving to California to work for a hugely awesome lisp company there.

Exciting and excellent times ahead, I’m sure!

Erik Winkels: ILGE 2010 Post-mortem: Engine Troubles over Tentacle Planet

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:41:00 GMT

Progress

I have made very little progress since the last report, mainly due to the little time that was available to me. Only two things were done:

The source code was cleaned up a little.
A windows binary was made (OpenGL only).

In the short term I will not work on ETOTP anymore but perhaps for ILGE 2011 or another challenge or expo I'll continue where I left off.

What Went Right

Making wrapper functions in C for Ogre's C++ methods and adding them to ECL from C using ECL's API. I used this approach because the inverse (making the C wrapper code from Lisp) gave me segmentation faults and didn't get me very far about 2 years ago. (Note: this was using ECL functionality, not CFFI for which there's Okra.)
Compiling a C program on both Linux and Windows that was (dynamically) linked to ECL, Ogre and OIS. This C program can, for example, start a game right away and quit back to the OS but it can also provide a CL REPL (like ECL's si:toplevel) so one can interactively play with a 3D scene. Since it's just a plain CL one can load extra packages and perhaps start Slime.

What Went Wrong

Compiling a statically linked binary on Linux. This didn't go as easily as I had hoped and was starting to eat into my time budget.
ManualObjects and shadows. I had to resort to Ogre's prefab entities to get shadows working the way I wanted in the time that I had available.

What I Learned

ECL is a really good option for embedding a CL implementation in C(++) programs. Juanjo has been working on ECL for years now and he's still going strong. Questions on the mailing-list are generally answered within hours.
One doesn't just add "-static" to a build rule and be done with it :-)
Perlin noise is usable to animate objects with. Definitely for prototyping since it's so easy and quick to implement.
I should brush up on my maths.

Source & Binary

The source code and the Windows binary are available here
http://www.aerique.net/software/etotp/.

I have not given the source code its separate GitHub repository since it will be added to Okra.

Linux Dependencies

ECL (10.4.1) configured "–with-cxx". (Feel free to try without it, I haven't.)

Debian: libogre-dev libois-dev ogre-plugins-cgprogrammanager

Windows Dependencies

I develop on Linux but the build is checked and tested on Windows using MinGW and MSYS. Either MSYS 1.10 or 1.11 was used, it doesn't really matter. The MinGW release that was used is TDM-GCC 4.4.1 but I see there's a 4.5.0 release out now.

Ogre SDK 1.6.1 for MinGW (there's no later 1.6.x SDK for MinGW). You can try the 1.7.x SDK for MinGW since the Ogre API is pretty stable, but I can make no guarantees that it will work.

Tobias Rittweiler: What I'm up to lately

Sun, 08 Aug 2010 13:15:00 GMT

Long time no update.

For the last few months I've become rather silent not only on the planet.lisp blogosphere but pretty much on the whole Common Lisp open source world. The reason for that is that since the beginning of the year I've become proud part of a hot telecom startup. Right after having had a big rush to finish my bachelor thesis in one go.

I've spent the last three months hacking in Malaysia, mostly in Kuala Lumpur, though sugared with occasional visits to tropical islands to keep sanity above a reasonable threshold. I now just arrived on the West coast of Sweden (reasonably close by to Gothenborg) where we're going to spend the next month at as we're told August to be lovely around there.

You bet what we're hacking in. Yes, that's right, we're doing funky TCP/IP related optimization and analysis in that dead, slow language. And I can tell you it's marvellous! It's a whole different experience if you can just make use of the language without being constrained like you usually are when developing open source libraries. We don't have to try to keep the number of dependencies small. We don't have to care about package name collisions. For example, we have a package named FMT containing functions to be used in format strings via ~/FMT:FOO/. Common Lisp is definitively a very nice language for actual product development. And it shows that is has been used for that while it was designed.

Of course, there's more that makes my time so incredibly marvellous: having pleasure to work with bright and, I think, famous guys, like that pseudo-german hacker poster boy Luke Gorrie, the omniscient Stelian Ionescu, homeless dude Ties Stuij of stix.to fame, the Erlang celebrity Sean Hinde, business genius Jane Walerud, and That Clever Statistics Guy . Also seeing different parts of the world, meeting kind people of different cultures, and developing sellable products and thus having customers to care about.

Fun.

Lots of it!

Lispjobs: Java/SQL/LISP - Senior Ontologist/Modeler (New York)

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:36:35 GMT

The candidate will be a senior technical ontologist/modeler acting in the lead role for the Core Services and Infrastructure Team within the Sales Technology organization. This individual will be responsible for modeling financial products and writing code to deal with the categorization of financial data.

Zach Beane: Tim Daly on Lisp

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 12:07:18 GMT

Tim Daly writes about writing big Lisp applications.

Here are some scientific

Fri, 06 Aug 2010 05:13:12 GMT

Using Bayesian statistics to detect an e-mail's spamminess. Most people are spending significant time daily on the task of distinguishing spam from useful e-mail. I don't think I'm alone in feeling that we have better things to do.

David Weinberger has flat feet: Programming

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:43:45 GMT

Welcome! If you're interested in the same kind of things I am, consider adding this site to your favorites, or better yet, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed .

Patrick Stein: Find the People: Lisp Programming Contest sponsored by TC Lispers

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:27:32 GMT

Your Lisp program will be given two input images from the same web cam. The first image will contain zero people, the second image will contain at least one person.

Your program’s goal is to find the people. You will get points for emitting the pixel coordinates of a pixel inside a person. You’ll get bonus points if it’s a head pixel. Be careful, though. You’ll lose points for emitting more than one pixel per person.

Deadline: September 19th.
Target Platform: SBCL or Clozure under Mac OS X (10.6.4).
Prizes for: Tournament winner, Prettiest code
Full Details: http://tclispers.org/contest-find-the-people

10 Experimental PHP Projects Pushing the Envelope

Sat, 31 Jul 2010 20:25:11 GMT

"As the saying goes, "Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should." But in the world of programming, stretching boundaries is just part of the fun.

Lispjobs: Clojure at Runa, San Francisco

Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:13:27 GMT

Runa

Demonstrating multi-processing in Bash 4

Thu, 29 Jul 2010 18:55:13 GMT

"I have an on-going project, to code the Collatz sequence in as many languages as I can.

Zach Beane: Quicklispin'

Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:48:15 GMT

Couldn't make last night's Boston Lisp Meeting? No problem! I put my Quicklisp lightning talk slides online.

Writing GNU Emacs Extensions

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 21:31:02 GMT

This book introduces Emacs Lisp and tells you how to make the editor do whatever you want, whether it's altering the way text scrolls or inventing a whole new "major mode." Topics progress from simple to complex, from lists, symbols, and keyboard commands to syntax tables, macro templates, and error recovery.

Zach Beane: Try ParenScript

Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:33:30 GMT

Nick Fitzgerald has set up a site where you can mess around with ParenScript in your browser. Here's his announcement.

(Thanks, arvid at lisp reddit!)

Erik Winkels: ILGE 2010: Engine Troubles over Tentacle Planet, part 2

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:31:00 GMT

1 Progress

Since the last report I've added: a controllable spaceship, bullets, tentacles and I made an unsuccessful attempt at producing a Linux binary.

For the controls I use the OIS library. I was already familiar with this due to my clois-lane library. The controls work but don't feel quite right yet and need some minor adjustments.

Adding bullets was straightforward. The most time was put into the tentacles and the attempt at making a statically linked Linux binary.

The tentacles are Ogre prefab cubes plot along a Bézier curve. The P1 and P2 control points and the P3 end point are assigned a new x,y,z coordinate each frame. This coordinate is picked by walking through 3D Perlin noise with a random movement vector for each point. (The vector was created randomly at creation time, it's stays the same from frame to frame.)

The code is a huge mess by now and it is getting in the way. Next priority should be a clean-up.

2 To Do

[X] rolling terrain (high)
[X] controllable spaceship (high)
[X] improve controls (low): The controls aren't quite there yet,especially moving left and right.
[X] bullets (high)
[X] cmake file (low)
[X] basic tentacles (high)
[X] shootable tentacles (high)
[X] collision detection: spaceship vs terrain (high)
[X] collision detection: spaceship vs all other entities (high)
[X] tentacles that shoot small spores (medium)
[X] roaming (bigger) spores that attack the player (medium)
[X] some minor GUI elements showing the score, highscore and FPS. (high)
[X] make binary release for Windows (medium)
[X] spaceship needs to cast a shadow in the terrain to judge heights(high): Solved this by using prefab entities instead of a manual object.
canceled: make binary release for Linux (high): This is just too much of a hassle. The Ogre package for Debian didn't come with static libraries and compiling it myself with "–disable-shared –enable-static" didn't produce them either so this is going to take too much time.
Eventually I managed to build static Ogre libraries but ran into other problems when compiling with "-static". Statically compiling is something I have no experience with and this looks like it is going to take too much time for the ILGE 2010.
For Linux it seems distribution by deb and rpm packages will be the best solution. (What a revelation!)

3 Source

The code for the latest version isn't available yet since it is a horrible mess. Keep watching http://www.aerique.net/software/etotp/ (not up yet) if you're interested.

3.1 Linux Dependencies

ECL (10.4.1) configured "–with-cxx". (Feel free to try without it, I haven't.)

Debian: libogre-dev libois-dev ogre-plugins-cgprogrammanager

Clozure CL Blog: Preliminary Windows GUI support via Cocotron

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:17:26 GMT

CCL on 32-bit Windows platforms now includes experimental support for the Cocoa frameworks using the Cocotron open source project. For details on Cocotron, see http://www.cocotron.org

This support is only available in the trunk.

CCL provides a pre-built set of DLLs for Cocotron’s Foundation and AppKit frameworks but, as this support is still experimental, you must explicitly checkout these files into your CCL installation. To do so, execute the command line

svn checkout http://svn.clozure.com/publicsvn/openmcl/trunk/aux/cocotron/win32/cocotron

in the directory where you have installed CCL (i.e., in the directory containing wx86cl.exe).

Once you have checked out the DLLs (and supporting files), you load Cocotron just as you do Cocoa on the Mac. In other words, evaluate the form

(require "COCOA")

in CCL which will load the Cocotron’s Foundation and AppKit frameworks and start the CCL IDE. You can also evaluate the form

(require "COCOA-APPLICATION")

to build a standalone copy of the CCL IDE.

You can also build standalone Cocoa applications on Windows using build-application as you do today on Mac OS X.

As noted before, this support is experimental.

While the IDE runs, it is not yet stable enough to use for actual development on Windows. Use it at your own risk.

Cocotron is a work in progress. It does not yet implement the entire set of APIs defined by Apple. It also has bugs. If you run into problems, you may want to try to create a simple Objective-C program to see if you can reproduce the problem without CCL. If the problem is reproducible, please report the problem to the Cocotron developers at http://code.google.com/p/cocotron/issues/list.

oldrunner 20100717

Mon, 19 Jul 2010 00:20:51 GMT

Oldrunner is a remake of Broderbund's Loderunner which contains the 150 original game levels.

Vladimir Sedach: Put JavaScript in your Lisp and Emacs in your JavaScript

Sun, 18 Jul 2010 21:06:00 GMT

This month, Red Daly announced cl-spidermonkey , a set of Common Lisp bindings to Mozilla's SpiderMonkey JavaScript implementation.

Not long after that, I learned about Marijn Haverbeke , Alan Pavičić, and Iva Jurišić 's CL-JavaScript JS to CL compiler. Apparently it's already faster than SpiderMonkey .

Not content with just having JS in CL, Red Daly also has a version of SLIME that integrates Parenscript to provide things like symbol completion (get it on github: http://github.com/gonzojive/slime ).

A little while later another surprising discovery occurred: a certain 3b hacked up a SLIME proxy and a fork of Parenscript that lets you run a SLIME/Parenscript REPL in a browser using WebSockets. Apparently this all happened in a couple of days as part of the The 2010 Lisp Game Design Challenge .

Unrelated but still cool, 3b also wrote a CL to Flash bytecode compiler .

Lispjobs: Ghent University, Clojure

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:01:31 GMT

We have a interesting job opening for a developer on site at Ghent University Library (Belgium) for 13 months. You’ll join our team to participate in creating a image search engine for high resolution scans of old manuscripts. Experience with Java/Clojure is very welcome. Like to learn djatoka,imageio, clojure, solr, couchdb? Please contact us.

Job description (in Dutch):
http://www.ugent.be/nl/nieuwsagenda/vacatures/atp/contract-tijdelijk/ivh

ABCL Dev: URI Pathnames

Sun, 11 Jul 2010 21:32:00 GMT

Among other goodies, ABCL-0.20 includes good support for using URI resources as arguments to about any function you would specify a filepath. Any builtin scheme like "http" or "file" or "jar" works as a full-on Lisp Pathname, with the caveat that one may not write to an associated Stream. We should be generic enough in implementation that the JVM extension mechanism for extending the classloader works for us for the most common use case, OSGi.

We pick up the ability to refer to URI, associating an input Stream with a source of lines easily as the following one-liner

CL-USER> (with-open-file (stream #p"http://google.com/index.html")
(format nil "~A" (read-line stream nil)))

Underneath we have implemented a new subtype of PATHNAME, namely the type URL-PATHNAME. We name this URL as opposed to URI as the underlying Java object is a java.net.URL with associated java.net.URLConnection that we'll be relying on for input sources.

CL-USER> (apropos (type-of #p"http://google.com/index.html"))
EXTENSIONS::SET-URL-PATHNAME-SCHEME (fbound)
EXTENSIONS::SET-URL-PATHNAME-AUTHORITY (fbound)
EXTENSIONS::SET-URL-PATHNAME-QUERY (fbound)
EXTENSIONS::SET-URL-PATHNAME-FRAGMENT (fbound)
URL-PATHNAME
URL-PATHNAME-AUTHORITY (fbound)
URL-PATHNAME-SCHEME (fbound)
URL-PATHNAME-FRAGMENT (fbound)
URL-PATHNAME-QUERY (fbound)
; No value
CL-USER>

The PATHNAME class now has two "beyond ANSI" subtypes: URL-PATHNAME and JAR-PATHNAME.

[[We analyzed the CL4J technical paper, but decided not to use their abstractions as detailed on armedbear-devel]]

ECL News: ECL in Apache: mod_ecl

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 17:16:15 GMT

Louis Höfler has created a very interesting project: a module that allows you to execute Common Lisp in your Apache web server, much like PHP and perl modules I assume

The first version of the module is available here
https://sourceforge.net/projects/mod-ecl/files/

It uses ECL as embedded Common Lisp in a very simple way. I would encourage people interested in this project to research things like security and multithreading.

Gnu Clisp 2.49

Thu, 08 Jul 2010 01:02:46 GMT

GNU CLISP is an ANSI Common Lisp implementation with an interpreter, compiler, debugger, object system , sockets, fast bignums, arbitrary precision floats, and a foreign language interface that runs on most Unix variants and Win32.

Lispjobs: LISP Programmer with C++ (Cambridge, MA)

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 21:14:18 GMT

This is a software development position where the candidate will be responsible for helping add new platforms to an existing internal program. This person will be working with a piler program and must have experience with the programming language LISP.