Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Against Custom Lisp REPLs: Embrace Native REPLs and Practical Tools

2025-08-20

The author lambasts custom Lisp REPLs (like CIEL), arguing they sacrifice the power and customizability of native REPLs, such as REPL-native commands, implementation debuggers, and the ability to customize using implementation APIs. The article details enhancing native REPLs with tools like the Trivial Toplevel library and rlwrap, covering custom prompts, commands, reader macros, and dependency management with ASDF. The author advocates using native REPLs coupled with practical tools for a highly efficient and personalized Lisp development environment, rather than relying on "batteries-included" custom REPLs.

Using ed(1) as My Static Site Generator: A Quirky Experiment

2025-05-31

Artyom Bologov shares his unusual journey of building a static website using the ancient text editor ed(1). He's tried various methods, from Lisp to the C preprocessor, finally settling on ed(1) as his static site generator. While ed(1) has limitations, lacking features like file inclusion, its flexibility allows for custom syntax and processing of older preprocessor formats. He uses ed(1) scripts for preprocessing and format conversion, supporting multiple output formats (txt, gmi, 7, tex, etc.). While not a best practice, the article showcases the unexpected potential of ed(1) and the author's unique approach to text processing.

The Ugly Truth About Lisp Indentation

2025-01-19

Lisp programmers have long debated the best indentation style. This article explores various approaches, including no indentation, function-aligned indentation, space-filling indentation, and the author's controversial "sick" macro indentation. Function-aligned indentation becomes unwieldy with deep nesting, while space-filling, though efficient, falls short in extreme cases. The author advocates for a "sick" macro style, which, despite being unconventional, maintains readability in deeply nested code and plays well with most indentation tools. Readers are invited to share their preferred styles.