Sunday, February 26, 2012

Ongoing Elsevier Boycott

Several mathematicians recently started taking action to boycott all Elsevier journals, following comments by Mr Gower of Cambridge. This has been a large enough embarrassment for them, and has gained international news coverage (I read about it in the economist less than 10 days after seeing the initial statements on Gower's Weblog.)

Mr Gower adds a rebuttal to an open letter from Elsevier to the research community here.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Inventing on Principle

Now I see what everyone was so excited about. Brett Victor - Inventing on Principle. is perhaps the most intriguing video I've seen in over a year. This is the future coming at you fast. It looks like dynamic languages are finally coming back to the future.

Thursday, February 02, 2012

A Simple Example

Occasionally, people make far fetched claims about the flexibility offered by lisp. Here is a simple example: editing the source code of a running program.

(defun foo () t) ;; foo returns true when called
(loop (when (not (foo)) (return))) ;; call foo repeatedly, until it is false.

This is of course a simple while true do nothing loop. But then we evaluate this little bit on the same system in a separate interaction session/slime buffer.

(defun foo () nil) ;; foo returns nil/false when called.

Amazingly, our loop exits, returns nil, and we are back in business. This is of course a contrived example, but not so far from the mark in expressing the simple idea that editing a program at runtime can yield a lot of power.