Two days ago I actually had the opportunity to present my Onward! essay.

The presentation consisted of a prerecorded video (which I think wasn't tragic) and a live Q&A session.

The first question was asked by Guy Steele, and I feel that I didn't deliver a satisfactory answer (it wasn't a hard question, and it wasn't unexpected either, so I could have prepared), and that's probably nothing, but I can't stop thinking that I could have answered it better.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@shriramk/117219154374251567

I'm in the midst of watching this, and a thought came to me, about this sentence that "engineering comes with guarantees and software comes with disclaimers", that the fact that we got used to this horrible model of using software, that we either have to pay for subscriptions, or by letting bigtech spy on us, can be a problem with CS education, which accepts a divorce between techniques and ethics.

I mean, I am a part of the generation that got fooled by google (and I still use gmail), but I still don't see the issues caused by computers (e.g. Cambridge Analytica/Brexit) being addressed by computer science departments at all.

We have armies of people teaching how one could build a facebook clone, but no one to teach how to tear facebook down, and no one to warn us that ChatGPT is the new facebook.

I just learned that my Onward! essay, "Programs Should Be Comics, Their Execution -- Animation", has been published in the ACM Digital Library (Open Access):

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3840586.3843743

Many thanks to everyone involved!

I recently managed to develop a fairly robust model for documents and editing operations in (literate) #GRASP.

I bet you've never seen the factorial function in #Scheme this tall

RE: https://front-end.social/@hdv/117166117030580508

Sometimes you just need to stand still to get ahead of the competition

"C++ is not *just* fun"
-- Bjarne Stroustrup

I've been a keen user of the "and-let* macro defined in the SRFI-2. I've even authored its sequel, SRFI-202.

But I never really liked the name.
I mean, it does reveal that conceptually it's an amalgam of "and" and "let*. But as a word to be used in a language, it's rather clumsy.

(In this regard it resembles "multiple-value-bind" from Common Lisp. OK, it does bind multiple values, but that's not a handy word. It's as if "progn" from Common Lisp was "evaluate-forms-in-order. I mean, "progn" is already a bad name compared to Scheme's "begin", but)

In either case, today I had a small revelation. I mean, I've been thinking about the right name for "and-let*" for many years, so moments like this don't happen very often.

So, ladies and gentlemen, who - like me - are disappointed with the name of the "and-let*" macro, even though you find the macro itself useful, let me present a better alternative:

given

You're welcome.

#scheme #lisp

I tried reading Knuth's "TeX: The Program", and probably (or most certainly) that's subjective, but I find the literate GRASP document so much more engaging to read

I recently got back to my work on literate #GRASP, and I think things finally started to look good. I implemented a new document representation (the previous one was built from cons-cells and multiple hacks), and I have some working tests that are capable of rendering this representation to "unicode-art" strings, and I'm currently working on a new parser that would work well with that representation.

I still have a long way to go before I get a running system, and I don't think it's a very good literature, but if you're a #Scheme maniac or a fan of #LiterateProgramming and you don't find the #Java runtime environment too repulsive, I invite you to follow the work and provide your feedback:

https://github.com/panicz/grasp/blob/main/literate/grasp.org

Currently, when exported to pdf, the document has about 100 pages, and it mainly describes language extensions that were developed for Kawa Scheme to develop GRASP. I think it might be a delight to people who enjoy studying language extensions, but unfortunately the part about the architecture and implementation of GRASP has yet to be developed.

(the document is written in #Emacs #OrgMode using its #noweb component for literate programming. I recommend reading it from Emacs rather than from its github preview)

My 2024 Causal Islands Berlin lightning talk is finally on youtube!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65sb3vfVfnA

RE: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@wolfpld/115859084785523065

Actually, this toot made me log in back to X for the first time since before presidential elections in Poland,

and gosh, what a terrible cesspit designed to radicalize people politically that place is.

Also, Carmack was one of the heroes of my youth, and it's kind of disappointing to see him like this, given what he could afford, if - in addition to "artificial general intelligence" he took some time to ponder genuine humane decency.

Yesterday I went to visit my old Philosophy Department, and I saw this poster on one of the professor's doors (bearing the title "Mathematical Logic and Foundations 1847-1947" and crediting Joel Friedman as its author, and providing 1976 as the creation year), and I felt that I have to share it on Mastodon (if nothing else, then just for the sake of writing alt text ;D)

It's around 3MB, so sorry about that, but I didn't want it to reduce it to make sure the letters remain legible.

I also found this write-up about the poster: https://dailynous.com/2014/10/28/mathematical-logic-foundations-chart/

Moreover, I feel that I was very fortunate to have received a job in academia, and this week I finished the first draft of the paper about GRASP (which - even if isn't great as a piece of "academic literature" - already had a therapeutic value to me)

I shared it with the head of our institute, a few days ago, but so far the feedback that I got is that my tone is too essayistic - which is probably right, because that's the style that I developed over the years, first at the Philosophy department, and then on Quora, focusing more on the ease of reading than on presenting raw content with RQ1, RQ2 etc.

In either case, the draft is available here (around 25 pages/10000 words):
https://github.com/panicz/grasp/tree/180c54191e4d1e431ec6455d97e657ec21ced2c5/doc/gvp

I'd appreciate your feedback, especially if you're from academia (so I'm thinking particularly about @khinsen and @shriramk but of course I'll be grateful for everybody's remarks)

I know, I know, there's still almost 3 weeks until the end of the year, but I also made a decision earlier that I'm going to write updates whenever I feel like it, and I've been browsing this year's statuses until I reached the summary of 2024, where I listed the following plans:

- start using GRASP to develop itself
- make it usable to people other than myself
- publish it in F-Droid and/or Google Play Store
- make a game for the Lisp Game Jam
- write (and publish) an interactive e-book (as a GRASP app) and earn $$$
- implement the features mentioned at Causal Islands (a comic version of the A* search algorithm and a module browser)
- possibly also integrate GRASP with git

NONE of those happened, and even worse, I was unemployed for 4 months.

Not that I wasn't doing anything. Conversely, I was almost constantly pushing myself to do something, to the point of a mania, but all those pushes sucked all the joy from the development, which is probably why I failed.

I think my condition somewhat related to that of people who claim that they experience burnout - I felt that even doing relatively simple things required considerable time and effort.

Despite all this, there is a number of things that I managed to do:

- I made a 2d physics engine for GRASP
- I wrote a self-hosting Scheme-to-Javascript translator (with macro expander)
- I managed to employ my toolchain to publish an app in the Android store (although I failed to actually publish the app)

There were also a few endeavours that were less successful:
- I started writing an interactive book, and then stopped
- I started repurposing my Quora answer as an interactive book, but also ran into obstacles that stopped me.

I had some positive experience yesterday, though. I decided that I will write a new micro-iteration of GRASP, this time in JavaScript and for the browser. My further plan is to rewrite it to a Scheme flavor, enhancing my Scheme-to-JS translator along the way. But for the first time in a very long time, I had the sense that I was really getting somewhere.

If you're new to x-box, you may find some of its buttons confusing, so I made this chart to help you figure it out

OMG they are almost exactly the same age

I wonder what would happen if someone locked Donald Knuth with Ted Nelson in a small room together for a few days.

Both are still alive, so should be possible.

Anyone?

Why is nobody mocking JSON for the amount of curly braces? ;(

OK I didn't realize Brad Myers was behind the development of Garnet and Amulet, and was also a supervisor of Amy J. Ko's PhD (among like 3 dozen other students)

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~bam/

such a shame they didn't have youtube back in the 1980s