Octopodial Chrome

From the Netflix blurb for Jeremiah:

Based on the graphic novels by Hermann Huppen, this sci-fi epic stars Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner as survivors of a deadly virus that, two decades ago, killed everyone but the young. In a world ruled by anarchy and danger, Jeremiah (Perry) is in search of Valhalla, a place that his father told him held hope for the survivors. As a new leader, Jeremiah faces warring groups of survivors who are hoping for peace, but desperate just to live.

Dear Lord, could it possibly be any worse?

…this sci-fi epic stars Luke Perry and Malcolm-Jamal Warner…

Has-beens…check.

…deadly virus that, two decades ago, killed everyone but the young

Hackneyed post-apocalyptic plot…check. As an aside, if it were two decades ago, then the survivors would hardly be very young now. Which explains, I guess, the casting of Messrs. Perry & Warner.

…Jeremiah…is in search of Valhalla…

Goofiness…check.

As a new leader, Jeremiah faces warring groups of survivors who are hoping for peace, but desperate just to live.

Piss-poor economics and back-story…check. Here’s a hint: very few are ever new leaders; generally it’s a long, hard slog to the top. Also, in situations of limited resources warfare is often the most counter-productive strategy possible. Let me guess—this is one of those post-apocalyptic tales in which everyone has a US Army brigade’s supply of ready-made ammo?

And once again sci-fi fans are left in the lurch. My question is: who thought that this could possibly be good?

del.icio.us (which is a right royal pain to type) is a wonderful little personal-bookmarking/collaborative-tagging application. You create an account and add a few JavaScript scriptlets to your browser toolbar—then use them to bookmark pages you like. Instead of categorising bookmarks in an hierarchical manner, like most bookmark managers, del.icio.us lets you tag them: I can note that my brother’s blog is both a blog and from family.

What is more, you can see other folks’ tagging, and you can manage your own tags; you can even see who else has linked to a page. For example, say I’d like to see all pages categorised as having to do with elephants; I’d merely got to http://del.icio.us/tag/elephant and there they are. Or perhaps I want to see all the folks who’ve tagged this blog: I can go to a list of all entries for my blog.

Oh—and anyone can see my bookmarks by going to http://del.icio.us/eadmund. How cool is that?

What’s best, of course, is that it’s free.

Years ago in school I was introduced to Lisp; my opinion was not very favourable. It appeared to be a goofy theoretical language, useful for exploring functional programming and maybe for AI work, but not for solving real-world problems. I don’t believe that I’m alone in having gotten that impression; for some reason all too many college CS programmes focus on teaching C and Java.

Be that as it may, I had the sneaking suspicion that Lisp might actually be far more practical than it had appeared. Folks like esr wrote that Lisp is worth learning for a different reason—the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; Paul Graham wrote many articles detailing, among other things, how Lisp was a competitive for his successful startup; Phil Greenspun expounded the famous Greenspun’s Tenth Rule of Programming: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of CommonLisp. And so I began to wonder what I’d missed.

Then Slashdot published a review of Practical Common Lisp, which I then bought. It was as though a door had opened in a hitherto-impenetrable wall! Seibel’s superlative work showed how Common Lisp could be used usefully.

So, what is Lisp? Well, it’s a functional language. And an imperative one. And an object-oriented one. It’s interpreted. And compiled. It’s dynamically extendable: the programmer has full access to the entire language when programs are read in, when they’re compiled and when they’re run. He can create new syntax; he can replace standard syntax. He can connect to a running application and modify it, correcting bugs as he goes.

CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System, is amazingly powerful. Rather than having methods tied to a single class, as with most object systems, methods are specialised on one or more classes—and they can be added after the class has been defined. This means that any programmer can easily and seamlessly extend a built-in class. Want to add regexp matching to strings? Then do it—there are no hoops to jump through.

Quite frankly, Common Lisp is an incredible language which has spent far too long in the background. So, of course, I’m rewriting my tasting notes app in it to see how it works. So far, it’s really cool.