Podcasters

So, have you ever wrote a podcast asking something and never got back a reply? What are the reasons you think? I always lean towards the time or mass of emails but there are a few that I've written into and gotten an immediate response and others that I get no response ever. Odd. Comments?

inkling

An idea market, inkling (link) is something that at the very least is an interesting thought experiment.

I really like the quote about "none of us is as smart as all of us". I only wish that there was a kanji picture for a logo or wallpaper that I could put on my desktop. Very cool quote.

Oh and the idea of inkling is to let groups of people predict things, such as language popularity, the idea being that a group of people can better pick out trends than just one pundit. And if you select something correctly, you get inklings, or 'idea cash' that show that you're in tune with the zeitgeist.....

CLOCC - the Common Lisp Open Code Collection

CLOCC - the Common Lisp Open Code Collection (link) is self-contained lisp code that provide various functions. Including the ability to parse xml with xml.lisp. Very interesting.

Oh and the net.list includes such interesting functions as resolve-host-ipaddr ipaddr-to-dotted dotted-to-ipaddr.

Sweetness. Granted I didn't see something like UDPServer but, meh, I think it might be something trivial to write.

On further musings, maybe it's time to revist that atom blogger mode in emacs-lisp. Something about Title: and then the URL: entry point that's just bugging me. That should be simple, but maybe there is something in the code that I'm not reading correctly.

Lisp v Python

On the Relationship Between Python and Lisp: compare the two. Well this is written from a python standpoint. So there is some bias. But then again, there are some salient points in the writing. Now language wars are always something of a "I can think in X, so it's cool" stripe but then again, what works for you, is the right one for you. I guess it's all a matter of tools.

And the thing is that I found this while looking for cl-xml. cl-xml *was* something that allowed a person to parse and query xml. But it was on a mac.com webpage and apparently the person that had it stopped paying mac. So it's gone. Much sadness.

DistroWatch.com: Link to get FreeBSD handbook free

Distrwatch has a link to get the FreeBSD handbook.(link)

The author has released the book under the creative commons license. I really really hope it helps to extend the BSD scene in ways that some people can't expect.

Practical Common Lisp

Practical Common Lisp: the book.

Yay, step 1 is done.

Is Lisp Ready to Become popular?

Google Groups : comp.lang.lisp: "Is Lisp ready to become popular?"

For me there are a few things that I need for any language to become my tinker language. A good reference that's online and offline. An editor, and a windows binary and a linux binary. Oh and if it's really going to get my attention it needs a schtick. Most of the time it is something like, well, an RSS library made by some other developer. It doesn't have to be part of the language proper, just something that I can go "Hey, you know I could cook up a distributed file pushing system with these three modules".

Oh and how fast can I "Hello World" something together. You know what I'm talking about, the ability to take some STDIN read it all in, parse and manipulate and spit the changed form back out.

reddit: Night of the Living Python

Reddit isn't lisp anymore. Richard Cook had mentioned this in a comment today, and well, here's the blog entry.

Much sadness, but then again, each project's language is a choice or medium of expression and sometimes it's just easier to express things for people in other languages. Granted as Paul Graham had said it was lisp, it was all I went with. Actually I'm kind of suprised that if he's involved in it that he went to the python side, as I always got the idea he was *hardcore* lisp.

Thanks for letting us know about that Richard.