AMMDI is an open-notebook hypertext writing experiment, authored by Mike Travers aka mtraven. It's a work in progress and some parts are more polished than others. Comments welcome! More.

A really simple hack for Lisp that reifies a partial call tree so it can be inspected. mtlisp/ctrace.lisp at master · mtravers/mtlisp

I have a Lisp library Wu Wei (Lisp) that I named for no very good reason, but I do think there is a deep relationship between wu-wei and the characterization of hackers as "lazy engineers" by Stewart Brand (see deep laziness)

Lisp as the language which makes doing this the easiest and most natural (through macros)

from SICP

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman. In olden times, used as the text for the first course in MIT's CS program. Uses Scheme (a Lisp dialect) which gives it a certain timeless feel.

This was all lots of fun, and the systems were successful as academic projects go. But it wasn't leading me to the Grand Insights I thought I should be having. The implicit vision behind these efforts was something that could scale up to something more like Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind, which was a mechanical model not just of animal behavior but of human thought. I don't think that ever happened, and while I might blame my own inadequacies it might be also be that Minsky's theories were not very language-like. A good language like Lisp is built around basically a single idea, or maybe two. Minsky's theory was a suite of many dozens of ideas, each of which was at least in theory mechanizable, but they didn't necessary slot together cleanly as concepts do in a pristine language design.

Amen to tools for thought. Not clear turning a programming language into an OS is the ultimate tool, although it is suggestive. This is the thing about Lisp – it may be a programming language but it also feels like a medium for expressing ideas. Most languages are utilitariand and don't feel like thinking.

book by Richard Gabriel, a lisp guy although this book has very little actual Lisp in it.

So perhaps the real power of Lisp is that it combines mathematical and pataphysical sensibilities.

lisp

Setup a new environment brew install sbcl M-x mt-slime (load "~/quicklisp/setup.lisp")

Can I load a local project that isn't part of Quicklisp? Yes. The easiest way is to put the project's directory in Quicklisp's local-projects directory. For example: $ cd ~/quicklisp/local-projects/ $ git clone git://github.com/xach/format-time.git The project will then be loadable via (ql:quickload "format-time") Also, any system file that can be found via ASDF's source registry system can be loaded with ql:quickload. For example, if you have a system file my-project.asd in /projects/my-project/, you can do something like this: (push p"/projects/my-project/" asdf:central-registry) (ql:quickload "my-project") If my-project depends on systems that are available via Quicklisp that are not already installed, they will be automatically installed.