oakes

How Clojure's documentation can leapfrog other languages

Summary

I made a documentation generator that cashes in on Clojure's dynamism. See the play-cljs docs (a ClojureScript game library) for an example of its output.

The Problem

Like many of you, I've often wondered what my final regret will be on my deathbed. My best guess came to me in a dream recently. I was walking across the charred earth of an apocalyptic future world, maneuvering around the remains of the less fortunate. I was startled to find a young girl, barely holding onto her life. She murmured something to me. I asked her to repeat it, and she said more loudly: "I...wish your Clojure projects didn't have such crappy documentation."

chaitanyagupta

Reader Macros in Common Lisp

This post also appears on lisper.in.

Reader macros are perhaps not as famous as ordinary macros. While macros are a great way to create your own DSL, reader macros provide even greater flexibility by allowing you to create entirely new syntax on top of Lisp.

Paul Graham explains them very well in [On Lisp][] (Chapter 17, Read-Macros):

The three big moments in a Lisp expression's life are read-time, compile-time, and runtime. Functions are in control at runtime. Macros give us a chance to perform transformations on programs at compile-time. ...read-macros... do their work at read-time.