I've seen mistaken claims along the lines of "Common Lisp is easy to optimize, you just add type declarations and the compiler will make it super fast!" So it was nice to see jdz start his article about optimizing Brian's Brain with "optimizing without profiling first is a waste of time." He covers using SB-SPROF to find hotspots and Paul Khuong adds some footnotes about how to interpret SB-SPROF output.

Tags: lisp

The second batch of chapters is ready for public consumption.

Tags: book, lisp

Last weekend the national radio channel "Radio 1" did their annual "top 100 Flemish songs of all times". You'll notice a few non-Dutch songs in that list like "Ne me quitte pas" :-).

I heard some pieces of this and was impressed by a song, browsing iTunes a little later I did the best impulse-buy yet. Hannelore bedert is the nicest singer that I've heard recently. She actually got 'discovered' last year, but I'm not a big watcher of Belgian TV so I missed that.

She sings quite nicely, not only in standard Dutch/Flemish but also in her local dialect West Flemish which is rather difficult to understand for normal 'Dutch' speakers (note to the reader: I mostly hear people talking vaguely Antwerp dialect round me). It has been compared to listening to someone talking while he has a hot potato in his mouth. The reason is mostly that that language suffered a vowel shift (nl long article, en short one) which means it sounds exotic and but really nice to me.

This video gives an interview with her and then she sings the song that landed her on position 10 of that chart. Dutch only I fear...

Tags: music
Current Mood: cheerful

Shaneal Manek writes about a new startup Postabon, which uses CL for its backend (for real):

I just wanted to talk about a few of the high level technical decisions that I’ve made – in the hopes that it could help other people starting new projects out (and that I can get some feedback and learn something myself). This post is going to be pretty tightly focused on the language I chose. I have a few other posts in mind on topics such as the database (BerkelyDB) and overall architecture that I’m planning to write up in the next week or two..

So keep an eye on the blog for updates.

Tags: lisp

In the November 28th 1982 issue of Red Rag: there's a call for 10,000 women to link hands around the Greenham Common air base at the international women's day of protest; in case you can't make it but would like to do something else useful, we print a list of local suppliers with contracts at the base. A day of action is planned to protest about pornography in the emerging video industry. We consider the link between feminism and animal liberation, why getting involved in CND meetings can be so uninviting, and the history of Dutch and Belgian offshore pirate radio in the early 1960s. The Council debates the Rock Festival and finally approves a night shelter for the down and outs, there's a plan to set up a vegetarian dining project, and the Legalise Cannabis Campaign surveys patterns of use.

Tags: red rag

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Of course, it gives me the following error:

define: not allowed in an expression context in: (define final (cons final first))

Any idea why, and how to fix it? :\

Thanks.

Current Location: angry