mikelevins

36 ms·

91.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I don't think that macros are the singular thing that sets Lisps apart. I do think that they're an extremely useful feature to have, especially if you build programs and systems by building languages in which to express them. Lisp
92.
by mikelevins 4y ago
Sure. It can also be fun, if your sense of humor responds to funny names, and if you choose the right inputs.
93.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I commonly build a name generator based on travesties or Markov chains. I can write a simple version of it in a few minutes in a familiar language, but it exercises file IO, some simple data structures, string operations, and some randomiza
94.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I have an internal monologue sometimes, and sometimes I don't. It depends on what I'm doing. If I'm trying to think of how to say something, then I have an internal monologue that I use to try out ways of saying it. Similarly
95.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I worked in a bookstore at the start of the 1980s. Its magazine section had many hundreds of titles (I stocked them). All of them were more or less that way: mostly ads by page area and page count, with the ratio of ads to content rising as
96.
by mikelevins 4y ago
There's a lot--pretty much a whole OS worth of stuff--but it uses affordances and metaphors that won't be familiar, and it might be a little hard to explore as long as it keeps disconnecting so often. To be fair, the login screen
97.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I live in Arkansas, smack in the middle of recluse territory. I've seen dozens of them in my house over the past fifteen years. I take 'em outside and let 'em take their chances with the birds, if the cats don't get &#x2
98.
by mikelevins 4y ago
None. Too distracting.
99.
by mikelevins 4y ago
The founders didn’t all have the same opinion on these matters, not by a long shot. It’s true that they didn’t generally hold democracy in high esteem. They were too well aware of its past failures, and wary of repeating them. They in fact
100.
by mikelevins 4y ago
You can load :aserve from qucklisp to get a portable fork of AllegroServe that works with sbcl (or at least it appears to at first glance on my copy of SBCL 2.2.6). The README distributed with the library offers a little guidance to getting
101.
by mikelevins 4y ago
How about, "I’m just going to take this question home to my office and work on it while out of all contact on no specific schedule so that I am not involuntarily preoccupied by my perception of a stranger watching me?" No? I thoug
102.
by mikelevins 4y ago
Yeah, no tv and no music for me. Too distracting. I’m a musician, too, which just makes it worse.
103.
by mikelevins 4y ago
It's nice to know that I'm not the only one.
104.
by mikelevins 4y ago
In the general case, maybe you're right. In my specific case, "struggling" and "out of your expertise" doesn't describe it. It doesn't matter whether your question deals with my expertise or not; if it&#x2
105.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I covered this in another reply, but if you use this process to see how I solve problems, you will conclude that I don't. You will witness me doing nothing, because I can't do anything in that circumstance.
106.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I can see why it sounds that way. Let me supply some context. I cannot answer any question in conversation with a stranger unless the answer is something I happen to know off the top of my head, or the question is about what I can see or fe
107.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I interviewed at Apple in 1987, and it was an all-day interview, but it wasn't much like the technical interviews I've done in more recent years--the ones characterized by brain teasers and whiteboard coding. There was none of tha
108.
by mikelevins 4y ago
Fair enough.
109.
by mikelevins 4y ago
It's a strawman because one doesn't have to want people to sit at home all day in order to advocate UBI. An advocate might disagree (rightly or wrongly) that UBI will necessarily lead to people sitting at home all day. An advocate
110.
by mikelevins 4y ago
So depression is not a matter of mood or motivation; it's a medical problem that calls for treatment. If you're just sad and anxious because you don't get along well with folks at work, that's probably not a medical prob
111.
by mikelevins 4y ago
Sure, it's not too hard. You need a new kind of function--let's call it a generic function. A regular function jumps to a user-defined body when called. A generic function is a bit more complicated: instead of jumping to a user-de
112.
by mikelevins 4y ago
An old friend of mine and I used to amuse each other by writing press releases for a fictional computing company that we called Infernosoft. Its tag line was "Software from Hell," but it also supposedly made hardware. One of its f
113.
by mikelevins 4y ago
HyperTalk and AppleTalk are both easy to read, but a little hard to write--AppleScript moreso than HyperTalk. I think it's a reasonable tradeoff to make. It may be too much of a pain form some, but I did some substantial work in HyperT
114.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I guess I’d say it feels like a cross between a guitar and a keyboard. I love mine; it’s my favorite electronic instrument.
115.
by mikelevins 4y ago
A starving artist. That’s what I was before I was a programmer.
116.
by mikelevins 4y ago
I stumbled across it when I was about twelve and made a habit of reading it fairly frequently for the following fifteen years or so. In my mid twenties I was in a graduate psychology program at a Buddhist college and one of my instructors w
117.
by mikelevins 4y ago
Walt Kelly, in the great comic strip Pogo, did quite a lot of this kind of thing, from writing short snippets of dialog (for example, when the French skunk, Mamselle Hepzibah asked the turtle to play "Fly Tough Zee Bumbly Beans" o
118.
by mikelevins 4y ago
Agreed. For reference, you probably want System 8, which was current around 1997, when SK8 0.9 was released, and a powermac G3 model or emulation of it from around that time.
119.
by mikelevins 4y ago
"I don't think I've seen anyone argue for any object system being strictly more flexible/powerful than CLOS." I guess I'd argue that SK8's object system was more flexible and powerful than CLOS. It was an
120.
by mikelevins 4y ago
"Steve Jobs was always telling the truth as he saw it at the time." I doubt it. I'll offer two stories about it. When Steve recruited me to work for NeXT, he spent an hour or two with me in a conference room, working on persu

More ›