In this post I’m going to talk about something, that has been on my mind for some time now, but I wasn’t yet able to express myself. I hope I succeed in doing so with this blog post. Let me start with this statement: "I'm sick of the pragmatism dogma" And I mean it. Let me clarify what I mean. When I speak of pragmatism I mean the attitude that is derived from the movement of the pragmatic programmers or rather what some people make of it. The basic ideas... Read more...
The problem I guess everybody has now heard of Symbol#to_proc and its applications. It makes your code a lot terser and also encourages a functional style of programming. I usually find myself facing the following situation. I have an object, like a collection, and want to apply a couple of transformations to it. This leans itself very much to a fold or inject in ruby parlance. However doing all the transformations in a block-argument for inject, just appears a bit cumbersome. So ruby allows the following: puts %w(Alicia David Lucie... Read more...
This short article describes dynamic attributes for ruby. Lately I’ve had to do with code that showed a common pattern which I named dynamic attributes. The Problem Did you ever come across a situation where you had an instance-variable and wanted a way to temporarily change the value of that variable during the execution of a block and have then the original value restored? That is what dynamic attributes are for. How do others solve it? Scheme addresses this issue in two ways: fluid-let (define counter 0) (define (bump-counter!) (set!... Read more...
Since I’m back to CHICKEN, I had the opportunity to have some time for hacking on it. I started to port, and hopefully finish up, the website for lisp-unleashed.de. Of course I couldn’t stand it and decided to implement the stuff I need with CHICKEN. There’s work to do In the very early stage I realized that CHICKEN was missing a feature that I learned to love, when I worked with other web-stacks like ”‘Ruby on Rails”’. They all provide some way to control your database-schema. Although you can easily... Read more...
It’s been a while since I did any more serious programming with lisp. My day job and my family take much of my time. After a long day of hacking ruby at work, I didn’t find the motivation to start private projects. After reading Let over Lambda and Practical Common Lisp again, I again came to to the conclusion that I need to do some more hacking using my favorite language. I thought of projects and of course of the dialect to use. After I first thought about doing something... Read more...
