This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Java Buzz by Brian McCallister. Original Post: Lisp is Cool, Smalltalk Scares Me Feed Title: Waste of Time Feed URL: http://kasparov.skife.org/blog/index.rss Feed Description: A simple waste of time and weblog experiment Latest Java Buzz Posts Latest Java Buzz Posts by Brian McCallister Latest Posts From Waste of Time

I grabbed the pre-release pdf's of Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp, upcoming from APress, because, while I played with Scheme a lot this past year, I have not played with macros at all. In skimming Peter's pdf's, he introduces macros the way that the lispers I know talk about them -- as a core piece of lisp which you should learn right up front.

Through chapter three, playing in the repl and reading the chapters, and beating away (I pre-empted his macros for criteria resolution in the db system built in chapter 3, but I suspect the macro-based system he builds up to is more efficient, and is certainly less code) at the code he introduces (ie, use his, break his, implement it slightly differently, curse as I keep getting dropped into the debugger (nice feature!) as things break...).

Ah well, I digress. I thought just the design options of functional abstraction I've been exploring in scheme have been cool, need to go back and play with macros there. I keep getting caught in schemisms in common lisp =( Ah well, play on!

(push 
  (create-book :Title "Practical Common Lisp" 
               :Author "Peter Seibel"
               :Keywords (list "lisp" "macros" "programming" "brain pain")) 
  *to-buy*)

Smalltalk, on the other hand, is frightening! I posted my joke about Aspect Oriented Inversion of Control (with Blocks!), redubbed IoC Type 6 by Geert, and no sooner does 1) jez say ~"I was thinking about doing that, actually", and 2) Binkley says ~"what's the big deal, Smalltalk does it now."