Radio Silence
I've been very quiet on this blog lately and have received a few emails asking what's up? This being the summer and having a 9 1/2 month old, I've been spending a lot of time just "being dad". In the office, I've been doing a decent amount of traveling for clients and I have been doing a lot of business development and infrastructure related activities (we're still growing rapidly). In addition to working with ColdFusion 8, I've also been using Flex and AJAX heavily for the past couple months, so that's also been keeping me busy. I replied to the direct emails that I received - one gentleman replied asking why I haven't squeezed-in any blog entries from home in my free time?
The truth is, in my "free time" in the evenings, I've been spending a lot of my time working with LISP. It's one of the few languages that's appealed to me for a long time but somehow eluded me - so I'm finally wrapping my head around this beast. I periodically try to look outside of my usual realm for different perspectives as well as ways to better myself both as an executive and as a developer. LISP, so far, has taught me more and changed my thinking about software development more than any other language. It's not for the faint of heart, but I strongly recommend it.
The truth is, in my "free time" in the evenings, I've been spending a lot of my time working with LISP. It's one of the few languages that's appealed to me for a long time but somehow eluded me - so I'm finally wrapping my head around this beast. I periodically try to look outside of my usual realm for different perspectives as well as ways to better myself both as an executive and as a developer. LISP, so far, has taught me more and changed my thinking about software development more than any other language. It's not for the faint of heart, but I strongly recommend it.
It sounds like you might have some interesting blog posts in you about your experiences and lessons you have learned about Software Development through your study of LISP. I look forward to these...
DW
I've been using ANSI Common LISP primarily and have tinkered a bit with Allegro LISP (which I also like). Scheme looks a bit lightweight for production - my understanding is that it's best suited for learning/educational purposes. That said, I've been thinking about getting better familiarized with Scheme because of the educational resources/materials available. There is a new version of LISP coming out (who knows when?) called Arc, which I'm very intrigued by and plan to take a good look at whenever it's available. I haven't played too much with Aspect or Object Oriented LISP APIs (like CLOS) a great deal, but that's something else I'll be looking at in more detail in the near future. To be honest - I'm really loving functional programming with LISP - but it's very different to CF, Flex (AS), Java, or any other language I've wrapped my head around in the past. It's also, in my opinion, much more elegant and more powerful, too.
I look forward to reading about your thoughts on LISP and how learning it can improve people's ability to design and write software in other languages (since I'm always advocating people should learn languages that are unlike what they are familiar with).
http://xkcd.com/297/
Also reminds me of the older:
http://bc.tech.coop/blog/070301.html
and:
http://www.xkcd.com/224/
Thanks for the pointers on the versions.