Lisp machines?

This page lists a number of now defunct efforts to built a modern Lisp OS.   I can’t help wondering (and I’m seriously not being snarky);  If Lisp is *so* damn powerful, how come all these efforts have failed? 

Of course, its possible that they’ve failed because their focus is wrong.   The author of the above linked to page mentions that part of the problem with building a Lisp OS is that a lot of the beginning work is low level fiddling with hardware.   Maybe the Lisp community could learn something from the Smalltalk community? 

Jabberwocky

There is something seriously wrong about the idea of a Lisp IDE written in Java.

Domain Specific Languages

There’s a great article over on Martin Fowler’s blog about domain specific languages (DSL), and something new called a Language Workbench. The language workbench stuff is pretty darn interesting, but the first half of the article worth reading by itself for a very good introduction to “language centric programming” with DSL’s.

This is that stuff that lisp guys rant on-and-on endlessly about, but I think Martin’s done a better job explaining why it’s cool than anyone I’ve seen before. Well worth reading.

Continuations

If it’s accurate, this post over at idea.log is definately the clearest explanation of continuations I’ve ever read.

These two posts also look like they could be enlightening, but I haven’t finished digesting them yet.

Lisp in 10 bullets?

Lisp advocates always claim that lisp is simpler than other programming languages, but Lisp in 10 bullets? That’s pretty concise!

Unfortunately, I don’t know enough Lisp to know if it’s very accurate.  I’d also be curious to see advocates for other languages attempt a similar “pocket ref” type summary of their language.  Any bets on whether it’d be possible to do Jave in 10 bullets? 

Overview of building a 3d game engine

There’s a cool set of blog postings over at Twenty-Sided where the author describes the process he went through to build a decently looking 3d landscape rendering engine. His description is a little to high level in my opinion, but he does provide full source code at the end for those folks who want to dive in deeper. All in all it’s a pretty facinating set of posts for anyone interested in 3d game engines.

The author also links to the Virtual Terrain Project. I’d never heard of it before, but it seems to be a compilation of almost everything you could ever want for working on a 3d terrain engine (for a game or otherwise.

Also somewhat related is this site that has a series of OpenGL tutorials.