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commit e358120dd3760e64436f5652895c751b39148ebd
   Author: Kyle Isom <coder@kyleisom.net>
   Date:   Wed Dec 28 19:22:59 2011 +0300
   
    initial commit

A brief stint playing with clojure made me miss common lisp, so I’m working through Paul Graham’s ANSI Common Lisp with a copy of On Lisp. My last foray, I learned from David Touretzky’s A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation, so this time I’m trying PG’s book. So far I’ve done more useful things, mostly by actually reading a bit more of the sbcl user manual (from which I learned some useful things such as sb-ext:*posix-argv* and sb-ext:save-lisp-and-die) and by the immensely useful site Rosetta Code, from which I learned about the DRAKMA HTTP client library. I’ve also been aided quite a bit by Zach Beane’s quicklisp; in fact, one of the things I’ve done is to write a short script to build an sbcl image with quicklisp and my most commonly used libraries built-in.

One of the things I love about functional programming is the idea that instead of relying on a lot of variables, you use functions as sort of “organic variables” that provide immutable data based on some input. The ability to build what feels more organic, less static. I think Steve Yegge’s blog post Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns is spot on.

I anticipate this to be the year of Lisp for me, as I delve into Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure.