killerstorm

lots of people complain about Lisp syntax -- they find it too weird and verbose, they call LISP "Lots of Irritating  Silly Parentheses"; and sometimes they even pop up with proposals to "fix Lisp" on comp.lang.lisp -- "Lisp is sort of cool, but this syntax... let me show you my great ideas." on the other hand, most lispers (and I among them) actually love s-expression syntax. who is right here? are syntax preferences a subjective thing, or one can decide which is better quite in an (more-or-less) objective way? or, perhaps, that's just a matter of taste and custom? i've got a good example today.. i'm using Parenscript -- cool Common Lisp library that automatically generates JavaScript from Lisp-like syntax -- and i've wrote a function that caches document.getElementById results (that makes sence for dumb browsers like IE):   (defun my-element-by-id (cache id) (return (or (slot-value cache id)     (setf (slot-value cache

"PHP vs. Lisp: Unfortunately, it's true..." article initiated quite active discussion on reddit , one fellow asking : Can someone post a tutorial for taking a clean install of Ubuntu (or windows or anything) to finish with serving a basic CRUD application using lisp? Maybe a TODO list with entires consisting of: incomplete/complete boolean, due date, subject, body? actually i had an impression that there are more than enough such tutorials, but as nobody replied i've tried finding one myself, starting with Hunchentoot tutorials. surprisingly, none of them covered a short path from clean OS install to working examples. neither i've found my ABCL-web  tutorial suitable for this, so i decided to try myself.  my idea was that Linux distros like Debian and Ubuntu contain a lot of Lisp packages, and it should be fairly easy to install them, as it automatically manages dependencies etc. i've decided to try Hunchentoot -- i'm not using it myself, but it's k

today trying to find a manual page for db_open function of BerkeleyDB in Google gave me sort of surprise -- first 6 links were broken! that's a bit unusual -- often you get one or more broken page, but six in a row is some kind of anomaly. first working link was on Oracle site, so I wonder -- was it Oracle pulling BDB docs from other sites?  so here's what Google returned to me: Berkeley DB: db_open The db_open function opens the database represented by file for both reading and writing. ... Also, calling db_open is a reasonably expensive operation. ... pegasus.cs.csubak.edu/docs/berkeley_debugger/api_c/Db/open.html site fails to open  Проект OpenNet: MAN db_open (3) Библиотечные вызовы (FreeBSD и Linux) db_open (3). Руководство не найдено. - 1. Команды и прикладные программы пользовательского уровня, русские | linux | freebsd | solaris | разные | posix ... www.opennet.ru/cgi-bin/opennet/man.cgi?topic=db_open&category=3 text says manual not found -- but why is there a lin