Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | yesterday
“The primary responsibility of the Senior Lisp Developer is the development of the knowledge base and algorithm engine for the company’s health and wellness application. This person is responsible for full life cycle development, from functional specification through coding, testing, and maintenance. “ link
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | yesterday
George: "That's why I'm different. I can sense the slightest human suffering." Jerry: "Are you sensing anything right now?" - Seinfeld, "The Couch" In my last post, the last paragraph, I said I'd be posting code shortly. Ahem...I like to think I'm ok at what I do, but I'm one guy. Any distraction stifles forward progress and yesterday a it was simply a traffic jam that did me in. I'll be posting code...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/24/2008
In a couple of hours I’ll be giving a presentation to lispvan about web applications with UCW and lisp. I’ve mostly been a user of UCW, and spent time over the past week reading through the internals so I can give better explanations. It’s a bit easier on me because UCW has been forked and modified by so many people that anything too in-depth would be inaccurate, so I have a good excuse for staying...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/23/2008
I forgot to mention one small but important detail in the last article about incremental development using Lisp. While building the guts of the app, I never quit it. Added a line of code, triggered a menu, tested and verified the new change. Lather, rinse, repeat. That level of interactivity certainly makes incremental development easy (passe even.) Lisp is cool that way. The editor's (Emacs, Hemlock...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/23/2008
Reworked the menu structure for Hemlock Apps on the train last night. Nothing significant, just a minor change to storage. Also, the first implementation built static menus and there's a need for some menus to be dynamic, so I sketched a solution to make them dynamic if desired. Gave some thought to walking ASDF definition files and parsing lisp code to extract content for presentation. Parsing the...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
Build some menus and the next thing you know, you're supporting them for the rest of your life... Feature request, huh? Well, that didn't take long...was using the new menubar/menus scheme with Ed Vecto commands, inserting Vecto commands into a lisp function when I decided to extend the Ed Vecto app to add my Vecto extensions and customizations. Ok, so now the Hemlock apps menus would need to be open...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
I guess everyone has heard of "the editor wars" (usually simplified to "emacs vs. vi(m)". So have I. I have one editor I use almost daily, but there are three editors I can actuall use (well, OK, two of them are more "editor families" than distinct editors). First off, I self-identify as an emacs user. I've used one or another emacs as my primary editing environment for the last 20 years. A new editor...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
Yesterday, while writing up a function, I used a combination of anaphoric macro and menu selection. A short time ago, I'd changed this same idiom from this: (let ((res (select-menu items))) (when res (menu-item-dispatch res))) To this: (awhen (select-menu items) (menu-item-dispatch it)) And I looked at the anaphoric form and said, that's not (awhen (select-menu ...)) that's (amenu ...) (amenu items...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/22/2008
It took more time to write the last blog entry than it did to make the menus work. Added all the Ed Vecto menus and tested them. All forms insert fine - with a couple of exceptions; the forms that have keywords or body parameters aren't parsed yet. Going to add my Vecto extensions and charting calls. Added some lisp forms and ran into limitations. The menubar/menu/insert forms work for simple, straightforward...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
hmmm. It's a bit dusty in here. After being poked by a few people to revive this thing, I thought I'd give it a shot. For various uninteresting reasons, the original purpose (of this blog) was not realized. Anyway, I think I'll use to do a couple of things. One is as a place to put/discuss snippits of code, etc. that people ask me for. Another to discuss issues I've run into, and lastly, if I can find...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/21/2008
In my last post, I documented some interface code that I was playing with for Hemlock, the Common Lisp Editor. I'd written two macros, 'definsert and 'defchoice for the purpose of creating functions that provided a means to quickly insert lisp forms at the point while making it possible to present custom options for selection on a per form basis. Friday night, I had a little time to play with the code...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/20/2008
I started a new job a little over a week ago wherein I have to write Java code, mostly writing tests in JUnit. I will state up front that I do not have anything against Java. I think it's a decently designed language considering when it was designed and its target audience. I should also say that I'm impressed with Eclipse. I doubt my experience with Java would be as enjoyable without it. Kudos to...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/20/2008
Did you ever want to recreate the source form of a package , to see what state it is in currently? With defpackage-form , you can! Then again, I seem to fiddle too much with packages lately. In particular, currently I am experimenting with a new work flow of Lisp package management. Package Forms during Development When writing new Lisp code, I start with just the essentials of a new package in my...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/19/2008
In my last post, I wrote a macro 'definsert to insert a lisp form in Hemlock. At first, I used it only for Vecto commands, but now it's working for some lisp forms, too. That's a nice bonus. Later, I was working with the Hemlock Vecto app. I wrote all the definsert's for all the Vecto commands. There were two functions that took a single keyword argument out of a set of three choices. Seemed to make...
Planet Lisp (Free subscription) | 07/18/2008
What's in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet, But it would suck if you had to type |rose| all the time. It's the things you don't use often that trip you up. It's been a while since I wrote a macro that defined a function and I was scratching my head when the definition came back in bars. (defmacro definsert (name &rest args) `(defun ,(intern (format nil "insert-~A"...
