Happy new year!
January 03, 2006 4:46Finally 2006 arrived!
Wew, it was a rather tiring December. I had a lot of "collateral" work: new servers, a web infrastructure to build, porting a web application to mysql (and Castor still refuses to collaborate!). I spent a very good Christmas with my family, made some good reads (my heap of to-read papers/articles/books diminished a little) and went to Salzburg with my girlfriend.
On the informatics side, I designed my 2006 LOTY: Lisp! I will dedicate a post on my decision (Why Lisp?), but for the moment let me say that Practical Common Lisp is a very good book! I look forward to learn using macros: in the second chapter Peter Seibel gives you a whole bunch of database bindings (with very easy to use select, update and delete functions) with only 50 lines of code! Amazing... It works only on attributed lists, but it resembles a lot Linq.
I am really thrilled to see if Lisp turn out to be the language for building languages that claims to be. I always thought that the most annoying thing for a programming language is to NOT expose the language, i.e. to not make available to the programmer constructs of the language itself.
Take java: I find highly annoying that the language has cast operators for classes and primitive types, and operator overloading for classes in the Java class library (like + on String), and do not let the programmer to use them! Till now, C++ was my language of choice for this very reason: it lets you to "adapt" the language, build a meta-language that fits your needs and your application domain.
Maybe Lisp macros will get an hold on me.. =)
Wew, it was a rather tiring December. I had a lot of "collateral" work: new servers, a web infrastructure to build, porting a web application to mysql (and Castor still refuses to collaborate!). I spent a very good Christmas with my family, made some good reads (my heap of to-read papers/articles/books diminished a little) and went to Salzburg with my girlfriend.
On the informatics side, I designed my 2006 LOTY: Lisp! I will dedicate a post on my decision (Why Lisp?), but for the moment let me say that Practical Common Lisp is a very good book! I look forward to learn using macros: in the second chapter Peter Seibel gives you a whole bunch of database bindings (with very easy to use select, update and delete functions) with only 50 lines of code! Amazing... It works only on attributed lists, but it resembles a lot Linq.
I am really thrilled to see if Lisp turn out to be the language for building languages that claims to be. I always thought that the most annoying thing for a programming language is to NOT expose the language, i.e. to not make available to the programmer constructs of the language itself.
Take java: I find highly annoying that the language has cast operators for classes and primitive types, and operator overloading for classes in the Java class library (like + on String), and do not let the programmer to use them! Till now, C++ was my language of choice for this very reason: it lets you to "adapt" the language, build a meta-language that fits your needs and your application domain.
Maybe Lisp macros will get an hold on me.. =)