Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

I am pleased to tell you about the new release 1.74 of CL-Launch, that small infrastructure I wrote to make your Common Lisp software easy to access from a Unix command line.

Since I initially announced cl-launch on this blog, it has grown a variety of features making it more usable, such as the easy execution of cl-launch from a script, a short notation for common cases (read-eval-print of single form), the ability to dump Lisp images for fast startup, support for more implementations (sbcl, clisp, cmucl, openmcl, gcl, allegro), a small library of Lisp functions, extensive documentation, debian packages, and more.

To make it more usable, I even officially adopted the shorter alias cl to invoke cl-launch. Enjoy!

I am pleased to announce the availability of Exscribe, a document authoring tool programmed and programmable in Common Lisp. It currently only targets the web, but it's extensible, so who knows?

You may remember that I am looking for a solution to the SNAIL problem, which will have to be based on epistemic monotonic logic. Well, monotone offers half of the solution, monotonic logic. And that is also the more useful half to me, considering that the instantaneous latency of my SNAIL networks is actually low: when my computers are connected to each other, then the communication latency between them is below a few tenths of seconds at most.

My friend Mahesh had this PB3400c with 80MB of RAM and 2.5GB of harddisk, that he wanted to transform into a jukebox. A few weeks ago, he asked me to install Linux on it, to play music off the network, and so I did. I learnt much more than I ever wanted to know about Macs, in the process, yuck, but it's incredible how Linux can turn an old computer into something able to use the latest intercommunication standards to do useful things. Here are steps to follow if you too want to install Debian GNU/Linux on a similar computer.

I am glad to announce my latest piece of semi-useful software, CL-Launch, an infrastructure to easily make your Common Lisp software launchable from a Unix command line.

Now that I have a newly working Lisp development system running Debian, complete with XEmacs, CLISP, SLIME, SSH and CVS, I have taken time to publish my Common Lisp software in the updated form of asdf packages, ready to be installed with asdf-install. Yup, that packaging software is named ASDF. Not SHRDLU.

Everyone having studied science has met Fibonacci numbers somewhere or another in his curriculum. And everyone having studied recursion in programming languages has at one moment or another been taught how to "optimize" an exponentially slow recursive implementation of the Fibonacci function into a linearly slow iterative loop. Except they were lied to. For that loop they learnt as a model to emulate is far from "optimal". There exists an algorithm that is (asymptotically) infinitely faster. And to understand how this algorithm may be devised allows us to explore a few ways that expressive languages like Lisp can open your mind to horizons unconceivable using such inexpressive and awkward languages as are mainstream in the industry. Have a look at fibonacci.lisp

Here are a few things I'd like to say about dynamic software development, after I've just had the opportunity to test first hand with CTO what I had been studying in theory and through the experiences of other people.

Now is a good time to announce that the software behind Cliki.Tunes.Org, aka CTO, has been noticeably improved.