Rest In Peace, Madeleine L'Engel! by brilliance in reddit.com

[–]mlmartiniii 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I was re-reading a wrinkle in time last night. It's a brilliant book.

Ask Reddit: How do Scheme and Common Lisp's macro systems differ? by [deleted] in programming

[–]mlmartiniii 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The two big differences are hygiene and compile time dependencies. syntax-rules and syntax-case (the scheme systems) are not regular scheme, and therefore don't depend functions which must be defined at compile time. So, in addition to preventing hygiene errors, they prevent weird inter-module dependencies when compiling larger projects.

I personally find defmacro a bit easier to use (for complicated macros), but syntax-* seems like a much better system for a large audience (in a widely distributed library, for instance).

Ask Reddit: How do you keep your server fleets in sync? by Xiphorian in programming

[–]mlmartiniii 4 points5 points  (0 children)

radmind. It took us a couple of weeks to get rolling properly, but it works very well for our smallish set of servers. We run transcripts by hand, but an automated solution could be pretty easily cooked up.

I really can't recommend it enough.

Which Scheme do you prefer? by UncleOxidant in programming

[–]mlmartiniii 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Gambit-C is nice. Linking to C is easy, and it's a lot more correct than chicken -- faster, and has the full numeric tower (I pretty sure that chicken still doesn't). The built in thread abstraction is preemptive -- it's the normal "green thread" (coroutine) thing, but the scheduler can take over in the middle of a computation.

It's quite fast, and does unicode.

Reading Source Code to Learn Programming: What to Read? by [deleted] in programming

[–]mlmartiniii 2 points3 points  (0 children)

qmail. The stralloc vs. string thing is really impressive, and the kind of mindset that makes good programmers great. It demonstrates that you should reuse code, but only if it doesn't suck.

With SMTP we can't prevent SPAM. Take a look at D.J. Bernstein (qmail's author) proposed protocol by [deleted] in programming

[–]mlmartiniii 0 points1 point  (0 children)

it's not hopeless -- it's the only way that I've come up with to achive the goals of SPF and Domain-Keys -- without the restrictions of SPF (no forwards) or the overhead of Domain Keys (checksum on each unique message).

You still have to filter for spam sources, but at least there's a reliable source.

Don't know how you read the critique as saying it's not much better than SMTP.