Nano-Blog : July 20, 2025
Nano-Blog for the week of July 20, 2025.
§ July 24, 2025 ![[QR Code]](IM/qr.png)
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Fennel is a newish lisp that looks sort of like Clojure and compiles down to Lua bytecodes. While Lua is an interesting mix of inspired language design and downright weird, a version of its VM has been ported to tiny microcontrollers, making it a decent alternative to things like MicroPython. Via Fennel, it's not a little easier to build embedded apps on small microcontrollers with a member of the lisp family of languages.
Into this environment comes Andrey Listopadov's require-fennel.el package which lets elisp talk to a Fennel instance. So if there's code that's easier to implment in Fennel (or if you have an existing Fennel app you want to "port" to emacs-lisp), require-fennel.el makes it easy to extend Emacs with Fennel code. Details are provided in Andrey's post Extending Emacs w/ Fennel.
§ July 23, 2025 ![[QR Code]](IM/qr.png)
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Collection of Counter-Intuitive CS Results
@hwayne (Hillel Wayne) has composed a nice collection of Cold Showers, or CS papers reporting counter-intuitive results on overhyped topics. As an example, they counter the statement "Static Typing reduces bugs" with a reference to a 2014 paper showing research in the topic is inconclusive. We wish the collection, hosted at GitHub (https://github.com/hwayne/awesome-cold-showers), was larger. If you have results to add to the collection, maybe Hillel would accept a pull request.
As an aside, Hillel Wayne has an interesting website at https://hillelwayne.com/ with blog posts that would probably be interesting to the general programming community. And they are the author of (the books) Practical TLA+ : Planning Driven Development and Logic for Programmers and the Learn TLA(+) website. Reading a text on TLA+ and its application to real-world problems is always time well spent.
§ July 21, 2025 ![[QR Code]](IM/qr.png)
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The Terminals Shine Like Stars
The computer center is empty,
Silent except for the whine of the cooling fans.
I walk the rows of CPUs,
My skin prickling with magnetic flux.
I open a door, cold and hard,
And watch the lights dancing on the panels.
A machine without soul, men call it,
But its soul is the sweat of my comrades,
Within it lie the years of our lives,
Disappointment, friendship, sadness, joy,
The algorithmic exultations,
The long nights filled with thankless toil,
I hear the echoes of sighs and laughter,
And in the darkened offices
The terminals shine like stars.
§ July 20, 2025 ![[QR Code]](IM/qr.png)
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BYTE Magazine's 1979 Overview of Lisp
It's no secret the staff at the Bit Roastery are Lisp fans. And for no other reason than that, we recommend reading the "Overview of Lisp" from BYTE Magazine's August 1979 issue (hosted at the Internet Archive.)
Figure: Cover of the August 1979 issue of Byte Magazine (the Lisp Issue.) Lisp is less of a single language specification and more of a family of similar languages. This article does a decent job providing the flavor of the language while explaining its basics. It's short and worth a read if you're unfamiliar with the language or why some people seen to love it.
Retrocomputing enthusiasts may enjoy other articles the same issue about porting Lisp to the 6800 microprocessor or a random investigation of producing graphics on a TRS-80.