I have been reading Practical Common Lisp and learning quite a lot in the process. However, I began to see a pattern emerging in the code that deals with objects that is also very common in Ruby. The pattern emerges where you have a class and you want to perform some initialization beyond what the […]

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Matt and I were discussing domain-specific languages the other day and no discussion of DSLs is complete without mentioning Lisp macros. After I explained how macros work in Lisp Matt said something along the lines of “Huh, that sounds cool but I am not sure how I would use it.”

This is what Paul Graham called […]

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An earlier post suggested that reading outside of one’s field of interest is way to sharpen critical thinking (and, by extension, writing) skills. Another good approach is to diversify within a field. For developers this means learning a new programming language or environment.

So, what is a good language for a dyed in the wool Java […]

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