April 10, 2023 ❖ Tags: writeup, formal-verification, lean, alloy, lisp, scheme
I started working on my master's degree last September. The goal was to return to my workplace as a domain expert in formal methods – a topic I knew I was interested in, and yet something I knew practically nothing about. I partially attribute my lack of exposure to the lack of supervised learning opportunities (courses) at my undergraduate institution. Brown has an ample supply of teaching and research faculty who work in the field, though, so I've been taking advantage of that and soaking up as much knowledge as I can. I'm writing this to summarize what I've learned and done through my few months at grad school, and also to touch on what I have yet to learn because, as it turns out, three semesters is not nearly enough time to become a "domain expert" in anything. A beginning practitioner, perhaps, but I'm sure even that's an overly-generous characterization.
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.
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.
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.