On to Common Lisp

C++ is boring, but it's a living. But I was looking at the magazine rack at Barnes & Nobles, and I saw that a British Linux magazine had an article on Lisp. I flipped through it, and saw a reference to the Lemonodor weblog, which I've enjoyed reading in the past. I went home, brought up Lemonodor, and scanned through it; enjoying the writing.

The next day at work, I have found myself wishing I had a good macro capability. I started looking for some Lisp materials on the web, and read this article by Paul Graham, which made me think that restarting the Lisp learning that I did two years ago might be a good idea. But this time I'm going with Common Lisp rather than Scheme.

So, when I got home I installed CLISP on my PC, which is now running Ubuntu, by the way, and I'm going to work through some books. Many of the good Common Lisp books are out of print, and available for free on the web! I will post which one I find to be a good starting place.

XML Alternatives

I found this list of XML alternatives on Uche Ogbuji's website. XML is great because of its ubiquity, but there may be cases where it doesn't fit very well. Check out the list if you find yourself in such a situation.

The Free Lunch is Over

I just read this interesting article about the growing importance of concurrent programming now that CPUs are moving to multiple core architectures. I've been dealing with concurrency in applications for the last 8 years, but for many programmers, it will be a new thing. I think this article does a good job of stating the need and introducing the challenges.