December 12, 2022 ❖ Tags: writeup, programming, lisp, guile, scheme, webdev
When I started writing this article, I didn't mean to do anything more than describe a comment system I'd written in Guile. But as often happens when I write, I soon found myself disregarding that original scope and recording the history of every line of code I've written that's ever been run by a web server. I settled on allowing this to be an article about incorporating dynamic content into a Haunt site – a use-case that Haunt probably wasn't built to support, but which works surprisingly well due to Haunt configurations being ordinary Scheme programs.
August 26, 2022 ❖ Tags: writeup, programming, arm, rust, pinephone, alpine, postmarketos, emacs
For the past ten months, I've been using my PinePhone as a "daily driver." By which, I mean it's been in my pocket everywhere I go, and it's the device I use to make phone calls. Depending on your familiarity with the PinePhone (or the state of "Linux Phones" more generally) this statement is either delirious, or vapid (why should I care that you use a "smart" phone just like the rest of us?) Don't be mistaken: the PinePhone is usable as a little cellular-capable PDA, and it's in a league of its own. This article is my attempt to document my experiences and rationale for wanting to use one, as well as my thoughts on mobile Linux in general.
July 20, 2020 ❖ Tags: opinion, programming, lisp, common-lisp, scheme
This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now: one anecdotally comparing programming languages in the Lisp family. I consider myself to be a Lisp hacker. Perhaps that much was obvious from the letter λ adorning my website's header, a reference to the λ-calculus which inspired John McCarthy to design the first LISP [1]. Yet, "Lisp hacker" likely means little unless you, too, consider yourself to be a Lisp hacker. Calling yourself one seems carry some level of unstated meaning. Indeed, some identify with more specific groups. "Schemer," or "Guiler," or "Racketeer," or "Clojurist." But "Lisp Hackers" ⊇ "Schemers". There is commonality shared among all, or at least most, of these programming languages, and the Lisp hackers recognize and appreciate that commonality – the characteristics that make a programming language a Lisp. Homoiconic syntax, powerful metaprogramming facilities, and editor support that, in my opinion, is unparalleled. (Yes, I am alluding to GNU Emacs.) This article, however, is concerned with the differences. In it, I will be considering the specifics of each dialect, and whether or not those specifics make for a language I would want to use to develop a new piece of software.
January 10, 2020 ❖ Tags: writeup, programming, reverse-engineering, video-games, game-hacking, javascript
If you're about my age and had a similarly dull upbringing, you probably also have memories of playing video games behind a teacher's back whenever class involved going to some sort of "computer lab." Flash games were the thing when I was in elementary school, and when I was in middle school, I'd bring Quake with me on a flash drive. By the time I was in high school, I'd realized that these opportunities were better spent getting a head start on homework for other classes, but I did have a few friends who still passed the time playing video games. Rather than Flash games or Quake, though, these were browser games using the new-fangled HTML5 canvas. I'd practically forgotten these games existed until someone from my capture-the-flag team mentioned "krunker.io". Apparently it's one of the more popular ones. It got me thinking about how I'd go about writing cheats for a game in the browser. Writing cheats for CS:GO was a breeze, so why would this be any harder? I had some time to spare over winter break, so I decided to give it a go and see what kind of damage I could do.
January 05, 2020 ❖ Tags: opinion, programming, myrddin
It's been over a year since I last wrote about contenders for the throne that C currently sits upon, so I'll spare you the prosy introduction and cut to the chase. I'd like to share some thoughts on my recent foray into a little programming language I came across while browsing lobste.rs some years ago: Myrddin, the pet project of Ori Bernstein. From the language specification, "Myrddin is designed to be a simple programming language. It is designed to provide the programmer with predictable behavior and a pragmatic set of semantics, providing the benefits of strong type checking, generics, type inference, and modern features with a high cost-benefit ratio. Myrddin is not a language designed to explore the forefront of type theory or compiler technology. Its focus is on being a practical, small, well defined, and easy to understand language for work that needs to be close to the hardware. Myrddin is influenced strongly by C and ML, with ideas from too many other places to name." The front page of the website specifically states that "[i]t aims to fit into a similar niche as C, but with fewer bullets in your feet." I see these descriptions and the cat-v-inspired stylesheets as a warning to those who don't appreciate a spartan attitude towards software development. Fortunately, I'm not one of those people.
July 13, 2019 ↻ Crosspost ❖ Tags: writeup, programming, functional-programming, linux, guix, lisp, scheme, guile
Hey, there! I'm Jakob, a Google Summer of Code intern and new contributor to Guix. Since May, I've been working on a DevOps automation tool for the Guix System, which we've been calling guix deploy.
May 04, 2019 ❖ Tags: writeup, programming, lisp, scheme, emacs, emacs-lisp
Rather than study for finals this week, I spent my time moving this blog over to Haunt. Previously, I was using Hugo, and while ox-hugo made the authoring workflow tolerable, doing anything on the rendering side of things was unsavory at best. I eventually had enough and decided to look for another solution, of which Haunt was the most enticing.
December 17, 2018 ❖ Tags: opinion, programming, java, kotlin, android
In the introduction of the previous post I wrote for this series, First Impressions of the Rust Programming Language, I alluded to the presence of arguments that programming language safety should be achieved by moving to languages such as Java which run on a virtual machine. While "safety" may no longer be the first thing that comes to mind in discussion of these languages, especially with the hundreds of vulnerabilities in various implementations of the Java virtual machine, it would be unfair to deny that the principle of running programs in a sandboxed virtual machine is safer than running machine code directly. This post won't be making any claims about safety, though, as I'm more interested in writing about my impressions from a language design perspective. So, how does Java fare in this regard?
November 02, 2018 ❖ Tags: writeup, video-games, programming, game-development, lua, lisp, fennel
Slime the World was my entry to this year's Autumn Lisp Game Jam, and it managed to win second place. The theme was slime, so it’s a game about covering everything in sight with slime, and the dialect of Lisp I chose to use was Fennel, a simple and elegant Lisp that I feel perfectly matches the simplicity and elegance of Lua. It takes on a more "modern" style that I associate with Lisps such as Clojure. I had initially pushed Clojure to the side, feeling it was too different from Common Lisp, but now that I've had a positive firsthand experience with a Lisp where lists aren't the data structure you always reach for, I'm hoping to return to it with an open mind.
June 08, 2018 ❖ Tags: opinion, programming, rust
C is almost 50 years old, and C++ is almost 40 years old. While age is usually indicative of mature implementations with decades of optimization under their belts, it also means that the language's feature set is mostly devoid of modern advancements in programming language design. For that reason, you see a great deal of encouragement nowadays to move to newer languages - they're designed with contemporary platforms in mind, rather than working within the limitations of platforms like the PDP-11. Among said "new languages" are Zig, Myrddin, Go, Nim, D, Rust… even languages like Java and Elixir that run on a virtual machine are occasionally suggested as alternatives to the AOT-compiled C and C++.