http://www.defmacro.org/ Ramblings on Lisp, Haskell, C++, compilers, web frameworks and more. en-us http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fractal.html Fractal is a Direct3D demo I wrote a number of years ago to showcase real-time procedural generation of natural phenomena on modern GPU hardware (GeForce 2, at the time). The demo implements the four elements - earth, fire, air (clouds and wind), and water. Procedural generation of natural phenomena was my passion before Lambda Calculus took over my life. Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:44:53 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fractal.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/s-query.html One downside of using Common Lisp to get things done is that occasionally libraries taken for granted in other languages are missing. I was using the excellent S-XML library to convert XML to s-expressions, when I realized that Common Lisp has no library equivalent in functionality to an implementation of XQuery. I needed to extract quite a bit of information from the s-expressions I acquired. Using CAR, CDR, MEMBER, and FIND quickly became infeasible. I had to roll my own query mechanism. It took me about twenty minutes to produce an acceptable solution. It's only around 45 lines of code. Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:11:17 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/s-query.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lambda-reducer.html About a month ago I decided to buy some time from society by doing a trial run of graduate studies - I took some Computer Science courses at Stony Brook University. The first homework for the Programming Languages course was to write a lambda calculus reducer - a task I happily jumped on. A few hours later I had it implemented in 105 lines of Haskell code. Sun, 24 Feb 2008 16:55:04 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lambda-reducer.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/ui-dsl.html I like HTML in the same way I like PDF - as a document serialization format that does a reasonable job and that I never want to modify by hand. This is one of the main reasons I started Weblocks framework - I never wanted to write a line of HTML again. Ironically, I ended up writing a lot of HTML and learning more about its quirks, accessibility issues, and CSS hooks than I ever wanted to, but I finally ended up with a high level user interface definition language embedded into Common Lisp. Finally, HTML is out of my life, for good. Being lazy does pay off. Wed, 13 Feb 2008 21:32:43 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/ui-dsl.html http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/continuations-web.html Aside from Weblocks, three frameworks I know of do a good job dealing with control flow - Seaside, UCW, and PLT. Proper control flow management is difficult to implement - it requires continuations, which most languages don't support. Because frameworks with good control flow management are so rare, most people don't understand what they're missing. In this article I'll describe the problem and how it is solved in Weblocks using continuations. A live Weblocks demo that showcases a practical implementation of these concepts is available. Tue, 20 Nov 2007 23:42:55 EST http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/continuations-web.html