miscellany: frienditto, Shabbat, programming

[cellio]

Obligatory Frienditto thingy: I'm not using it (really see no point; my journal is archived on LJ and on my computer). I expect that no one on my friends' list would violate my trust by publicly posting locked entries. I presume the tempest in the teapot will die down Real Soon Now.

Shabbat was pleasant. Saturday morning a young man who was bar mitzvah last summer read torah for our minyan (for the second time since his bar mitzvah). I'm glad that he's continuing to both attend and participate, and that he feels comfortable reading in front of our group.

The start-up that Dani works for has a major deadline Monday, so he worked all day Saturday. And all evening, and night. Whee. I met him for dinner after Shabbat and then met his co-workers. When we walked in the lead engineer turned to me and said something like "ready to write some LISP?". I said "LISP? I thought you were a Java shop", and he shrugged and started talking about something else. So I gave it no further thought at the time, figuring it was some sort of odd joke or something. (I just assumed that Dani had, somewhere along the line, talked about his wife the former LISPer.)

I asked Dani about it today, and he said that, in fact, one third-party tool they have to intergrate with has an API that resembles a cross between C and LISP. I didn't ask for details, but he said there's clearly a LISP interpreter under there somewhere because they get error messages that include names of LISP functions. Weird.

It's been almost 15 years since I wrote LISP professionally, but it was a fantastic language and if I'd known the guy was serious, I would have asked him to tell me more. I'd have been willing to give them a couple hours. (I have another friend there too.) Now, it probably wouldn't have been a net savings for him, because he would have had to teach me enough about the application to be useful, but...

Comments

[jducoeur]

I didn't ask for details, but he said there's clearly a LISP interpreter under there somewhere because they get error messages that include names of LISP functions. Weird.

Actually, it's not that strange if you think about it. LISP is possibly the easiest powerful language to implement -- I've written implementations a couple of times for exactly this kind of tool use, because I can whip up a simple LISP interpreter pretty quickly. Indeed, had Trenza survived, the plan was that our main world-programming language was going to be Scheme, which is a sort of purified version of LISP.

With the rise of Javascript (ick) as a sort of universal scripting language, usage of LISP has been shrinking. But it's still damned useful at times...

[cellio]

Hmm, you're probably right. I hadn't considered the "write the tool in order to write the tool" approach. (I've never actually written an interpreter myself.)