vindarel

Developer experience, libraries, performance… (2021/11)

I'll preface this with three things. 1. I prefer schemes over Common Lisps, and I prefer Racket of the Schemes. 2. There is more to it than the points I raise here. 3. I assume you have no previous experience with Lisp, and don't have a preference for Schemes over Common Lisp. With all that out of the way... I would say Common Lisp/SBCL. Let me explain

1. SBCL Is by far the most common of the CL implementations in 2021. It will be the easiest to find help for, easiest to find videos about, and many major open source CL projects are written using SBCL
2. Download a binary directly from the website http://www.sbcl.org/platform-table.html (even for M1 macs) to get up and running (easy to get started)
3. Great video for setting up Emacs + Slime + Quick Lisp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnWVu8VVDbI

Now as to why Common Lisp over Scheme

roman01la

ClojureScript REPL Workflow

Short write up on using REPL when developing UIs in ClojureScript.

Hot-reload on save or Eval in REPL?

Everyone's standard approach to hot-reloading is to use a tool (Figwheel or shadow-cljs) that reloads changed namespaces automatically. This works really well: you change the code, the tool picks up changed files, compiles namespaces and dependants, notifies REPL client which then pulls in compiled changes, and re-runs a function that re-renders UI.

The other approach is to use ClojureScript's REPL directly and rely only on eval from the editor. This more or less matches Clojure style workflow. This approach might be useful when you don't want tools overhead or hot-reloading becomes slow for you or you just used to this style of interactions. Also changing code doesn't always mean that you want to reload all the changes. On the other hand it is very easy to change a couple of top-level forms and forget to eval one of them.

ww9

Blogging with Gist

Gist simplicity can turn blogging into a liberating experience.

Pros	Cons
✅ Free, simple, fast, hassle-free	❌ Image upload in comments only
✅ Tagging	❌ No post pinning
✅ Search	❌ Doesn't look like a blog
✅ Revisions	❌ Unfriendly URLs

dvanhorn

#lang racket
(provide tweet! (struct-out oauth) current-oauth)
(require (only-in racket/random crypto-random-bytes)
         json
         net/url
         (only-in net/uri-codec [uri-unreserved-encode %])
         web-server/stuffers/hmac-sha1
         (only-in net/base64 base64-encode))

;; tweet! : String -> JSON

gravitylow

If you are getting this in gdb on macOS while trying to run a program:

Unable to find Mach task port for process-id 57573: (os/kern) failure (0x5).
 (please check gdb is codesigned - see taskgated(8))

1. Open Keychain Access
2. In menu, open Keychain Access > Certificate Assistant > Create a certificate
3. Give it a name (e.g. gdbc)

jlongster

(defun keynote-highlight ()
  (interactive)
  (shell-command-on-region
   (region-beginning)
   (region-end)
   "highlight -O rtf --font-size 36 --font Inconsolata --style solarized-dark -W -J 50 -j 3 --src-lang ruby | pbcopy"))

mpasternacki

FreeBSD on a MacBook Pro

Since 2008 or 2009 I work on Apple hardware and OS: back then I grew tired of Linux desktop (which is going to be MASSIVE NEXT YEAR, at least since 2001), and switched to something that Just Works. Six years later, it less and less Just Works, started turning into spyware and nagware, and doesn't need much less maintenance than Linux desktop — at least for my work, which is system administration and software development, probably it is better for the mythical End User person. Work needed to get software I need running is not less obscure than work I'd need to do on Linux or othe Unix-like system. I am finding myself turning away from GUI programs that I used to appreciate, and most of the time I use OSX to just run a terminal, Firefox, and Emacs. GUI that used to be nice and unintrusive, got annoying. Either I came full circle in the last 15 years of my computer usage, or the OSX experience degraded in last 5 years. Again, this is from a sysadmin/developer ki

jboner

Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
----------------------------------
L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD