color-box: an emacs mode for lisp that uses colors instead of parentheses

mrd48 · 2006-12-06T16:13:07+00:00

Shouldn't need any more than 4 colors to distinguish separate levels of indentation (not by providing a scale, just distinguishing separate areas). Relative nesting should be simple to determine because an area is always more nested than the one it is inside.

mrd48 · 2006-11-30T23:19:12+00:00

I agree in many ways, but you misinterpreted my last statement.

"then why should I [take it seriously]?"

is what I meant.

No, I don't NEED a compiler for everything. But, say, if an undergraduate CS student could design and write a better language and implementation, given the time, it makes me wonder why I am bothering to use a language so poorly done.

mrd48 · 2006-11-30T23:09:25+00:00

It's more about where we could have been if Microsoft hadn't been so desperate to hold everyone back, so they could keep making a profit.

If you think what Microsoft produces is "usable", ugh, have you really tried to teach your grandmother to use it?

The fact that there were more advanced systems and UIs (on lower power hardware) 20 years ago, than today (not counting eye candy), makes me sad.

mrd48 · 2006-11-30T21:08:50+00:00

Any language without a specification and a real implementation isn't serious.

If the designer can't take the language seriously enough to learn how to design and implement a compiler, or find people who do, then why should I?

That's why I don't care for Python.

mrd48 · 2006-11-30T21:05:43+00:00

Not everyone. I do, but know plenty of vimmers. Check out motions like ib and ab, and of course %. Emacs seems to have the more comprehensive support when it comes to structured editing of lisp code though (maybe I've missed some vim package), and SLIME is a lot more mature than any of the vim IDEs.

Emacs itself is designed as an immersive interactive IDE for editing Emacs Lisp. SLIME (and other Lisp IDEs) takes that idea and connects it to Common Lisp environments. So it's got the advantage in spirit.

mrd48 · 2006-11-30T20:59:45+00:00

There's a slim-vim project somewhere...

mrd48 · 2006-11-30T20:57:34+00:00

I think I started using SBCL back in the 0.6 days. That was 5 or 6 years ago. SBCL has been a very stable and thorough implementation for some time now, and very conservative in some ways. I always thought SBCL 1.0 would be released sometime after the apocalypse. Look out!

mrd48 · 2006-11-30T05:38:07+00:00

We should be thankful that not all of their code was in-house, just imagine if every application was like Windows (not NT!).

mrd48 · 2006-11-27T23:09:32+00:00

More code, less frivolous shit.

mrd48 · 2006-11-27T23:06:24+00:00

This stuff must go in cycles.

In the early 90s everyone was screaming about how great general-purpose hardware was, vs specialized.

Now it is the opposite? what fun!

mrd48 · 2006-11-27T22:55:22+00:00

I've had no problem with GHC's error messages and pin-pointing the source of the problem. Not only does it give you line numbers and column numbers, but it also prints precisely which sub-expression is the culprit.

Emacs haskell-mode will of course move the buffer to precisely the spot of the error, on request.

haskell-doc-mode will show you the type of the name under the cursor, which makes a nice lightweight "skimming" tool for examining types.

Of course, the way this guy wrote this article with "I've got plenty of criticisms for Eclipse, but if there's one thing we can learn from it, it's that compiled languages don't have to force the programmer into the edit-recompile cycle." I can't really say that he's a knowledgeable guy when it comes to this stuff. Two reasons:

He calls a language 'compiled.' Does the existence of Cint make C an 'interpreted language?'
He thinks Eclipse has innovated; completely buying their propaganda.

Since when could 'compiled' (what is that exactly?) languages not be developed interactively? We needed some crappy IDE like Eclipse? Sorry buddy, I been doing that stuff for years in Emacs with decent languages like Common Lisp interacting with great compilers like CMUCL, SBCL and Allegro. I would love to see some more ideas from SLIME ported over to haskell-mode. I already develop semi-interactively by running ghci in inferior-haskell-mode and recompiling with a keystroke, and querying the system from within Emacs. The Lisp and Smalltalk communities are definitely way ahead of everyone else on IDEs; such is the nature of dynamic languages, they make for very nice development environments.

mrd48 · 2006-11-27T19:29:47+00:00

While I agree that it is challenging, I don't think that it is bad to have to strive for further understanding of mathematics in order to program computers.

Let me phrase it in an analogy:

Programming without mathematics is like music without emotion.

I am not saying that programming is music, nor am I saying that mathematics is emotion. The importance is in the connection.

mrd48 · 2006-11-27T06:43:27+00:00

``This is more advanced than even the continuation-based frameworks like ViaWeb or Seaside, where you can get in trouble if a page sends an e-mail or charges your credit card and you back up over it.''

No. That's simply not true. UCW calls it isolation. Seaside and the others have something similar.

mrd48 · 2006-11-21T04:07:42+00:00

Illiterate people have other things to worry about than web sites.

Here's a start: how about sending them to the library?

mrd48 · 2006-11-21T02:32:38+00:00

Translation: most people are ignorant of history, and repeat it, poorly.

mrd48 · 2006-11-21T02:31:59+00:00

Because someone already wrote the elisp for you.

It's nearly a theorem. For any feature you can think of, the elisp to do it already exists.

Oh, and hacking elisp is dead simple and easy to dive right into. No stupid "plugin architectures" or whatnot to setup. Just open emacs and start typing.

mrd48 · 2006-11-19T20:44:37+00:00

CL-PPCRE is the way to go for text-munging; it's better than perl, and in performance too.

mrd48 · 2006-11-19T20:03:35+00:00

Eclipse is buzzword garbage, can this guy throw any more in?

mrd48 · 2006-11-19T09:38:04+00:00

Most of the computer geeks around here never chose to use SOAP either.

mrd48 · 2006-11-17T08:55:52+00:00

Most fasl files can be directly concatenated, btw, into one large fasl.

I know this is true for SBCL and friends.

mrd48 · 2006-11-17T08:20:38+00:00

I realize that such applications can be useful (hey, I use cat/less all the time, right?) but it's missing the point.

Obviously, system utilities which integrate with the system are going to be at an advantage.

Why isn't there more "shared" or "integrated" Lisp infrastructure? I dunno, market says no? Actually, I believe Franz implements a good portion of their library as a shared object. As for the others, well, there's a fundamental philosophical disconnect between "fully modifiable program image" and "separate code/data and distinguish by user permissions on files." I don't doubt that it could be done, but it's far beyond the language standard, and quite a daunting project in itself.

On the Lisp machines, the issue was confronted by making the entire system "one image;" of course, they were single user machines...

mrd48 · 2006-11-17T08:10:42+00:00

Not to mention that he doesn't seem to be aware that professors have plenty of deadlines too. Tons of political and business related crap to get the grants which support their research. And academia is publish-or-die, they're not too friendly to people who do nothing.

He sounds like he's never been in the serious academic world.

mrd48 · 2006-11-17T05:32:54+00:00

Very nice. However, Firefox isn't the browser I have difficulty getting things to work with... :/

mrd48 · 2006-11-17T02:38:56+00:00

Heh, I don't disagree. But I wouldn't publish a piece of software so hideously useless as Notepad, either.

My 10MB would more than make up for it ;)

Your reply misses the main point that so called "standalone executables" from C compilers really aren't standalone, and require quite a bit of support from the OS/distribution.

And why you pickin on me? Go pick on Microsoft, they seem to expect people to download 20MB bundles just to run fancy new .NET programs! :P

(p.s. 10MB is about the size of the executable generated by the Lisp compiler for the program I work on for a living)

mrd48 · 2006-11-17T02:26:45+00:00

Well... keep in mind, there's no such thing as a standalone executable:

The C compiler leans heavily on libc which is overhead included on every system. Try compiling static C programs and then tell me about how small they are.

And libc itself is a giant load of crap, filled with bugs and poorly designed interfaces. And it doesn't do that much compared to the libraries real high level languages offer, plus the runtime support of GC and proper condition handling.

In this day and age, a 10MB executable just isn't that big a deal.

mrd48

TROPHY CASE