Summer Trivia: it's the silly season posted 1058 days and 22 hours ago on Thursday August 10 2006, at 13:21

In the English media, this time of year is known as the silly season. All the politicians, news makers, and opinion shapers have gone on holiday, to their Italian villas, country houses, or tropical islands. The newspapers are staffed by a few lonely hacks trying to fill a paper with fabricated news stories, pointless lists, and celebrity-based trivia. We can do that too! Here’s some newLISP trivia, a little light holiday reading for these lazy hot summer days and nights.

What’s simple, small, agile, cooperative, and adapting?

Why, newLISP, of course. That’s the philosophy, according to its creator.

Byoms, not biomes

Do you know what a Byom is? These guys do. It’s a cool IM search thingy. They like newLISP too.

How big?

/usr/bin/newlisp is 218932 bytes. As someone said after downloading it: “Is that really a complete language, in 220K?”. It is, and it would fit nicely on my camera’s flash memory card.

Popularity of programming languages by Google mentions

Some lazy journalists do most of their research with Google. For example, they would write something like this:

The Visual Basic language is rapidly being superseded by Ruby, according to the latest research. Figures show the version of BASIC from the Seattle software giant is only half as popular as the trendy new object-oriented scripting language written by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto.

Let’s see how popular various program languages are according to the number of hits Google finds:

5,960,000,000 c
  343,000,000 perl
  233,000,000 c++
  173,000,000 ruby
   99,500,000 pascal
   98,100,000 "visual basic"
   65,100,000 dylan
   43,000,000 python
   29,700,000 lisp
    9,000,000 haskell
    6,700,000 lua
    5,140,000 erlang
    4,330,000 ocaml
       23,300 newlisp

Scientific proof! The numbers also show that we still have quite a lot of work to do to promote newLISP. newLISP, newLISP, newLISP. There, that’s three more occurrences for Google to find and add to the list. Also, we’ll get Madonna to call her next album “naked and newLISP” - that should do the trick.

Stacked

Did You Know Dept. The author of newlisp once wrote a FORTH interpreter/compiler. Here’s the first line of my FORTH interpreter:

> (while true (eval-string (read-line 0)) (println "OK"))

OK? ;-)

Run newLISP scripts easily

Did You Know Dept. Did you know that you can easily run newLISP scripts from the MacOS X menu bar? All you need is Apple’s Script Menu, designed both for AppleScripts and other scripts. (If you can’t see it, run /Applications/AppleScript/AppleScript Utility.) The Script Menu shows both global scripts and the scripts that are designed for the application you’re running. Global scripts should be stored in /Users/you/Library/Scripts/. Scripts to be run in, say, Safari should be in /Users/you/Library/Scripts/Applications/Safari/.

Here’s a bit of script to get you started:

#!/usr/bin/newlisp
(define (get-safari-page-link)
    (exec 
        (format [text]osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to set urlLink to URL of front document
        return urlLink'[/text] )))
(define (get-safari-page-title)
    (exec 
        (format [text]osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to set urlTitle  to name of front document
        return  urlTitle'[/text] )))
(define (get-safari-page-source)
    (exec 
        (format [text]osascript -e 'tell application "Safari" to set urlSource  to source of front document
        return urlSource'[/text] )))
(println 
    (get-safari-page-link)
    (get-safari-page-title)
    (get-safari-page-source))

You don’t have to use a special suffix for the file. Output goes to the console. And don’t forget to make the file executable first…(like I do)!

10 quotes about newLISP from the internet

Hey, who needs Common LISP, now we have newLISP!

‘newLISP’ is a farce.

I’m trying to get started with lisp and newlisp is just way more accessible than this huge thing called common lisp

If I could, I would euthanize newlisp for the good of programmers the world over.

It’s really fast and cool for programming, really enjoyable…

It’s appropriately named - sort of like Orwell’s newspeak…

It is a remarkable language. I don’t want to write code in anything else.

Rarely can one point to a language that’s even more fucked up than early Perl or PHP, but today you can…

It’s faster than bejeepers. I run it on my webhost as a scripting language. Simple, fast, elegant.

It seems worse than a disaster.

The designers seem to know how to spell intuition.

Seems to be really alien.

Yes. I love it. It is small quick-hack-friendly and easy.

(That’s not 10 - Ed.)

Come back soon!

That’s all from me for a few weeks. Have a good holiday!

Comment from bob bae

NIce...

But how do the google guys know that people were searching for C language? I mean it's only one letter!

Good to know that C is still #1!!! I spent 20 years doing C.

Comment from newlisper

Hi Bob. Thanks for the comment. I hope you didn't miss the point - that so-called 'research' based on rubbish googling is increasingly polluting the media. It was me typing "c" into google, and only a few of the hits were relevant to the language! As for python, I hear its a large heavy-bodied venomouse snake, and Ruby really is the name of a porn star! :-)

Comment from Anonymous

Ruby is not a new language. It is 13.5 years old according to it's creator. See http://www.rubygarden.org/faq/entry/show/5.

Comment from newlisper

Hmm, pedantry applied to throwaway humor. Interesting idea!

Perhaps we all need a holiday if we start taking stuff like this seriously.

:-) link

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that's all folks!

Links

Summer Trivia: it's the silly season posted 1058 days and 22 hours ago on Thursday August 10 2006, at 13:21

What’s simple, small, agile, cooperative, and adapting?

Byoms, not biomes

How big?

Popularity of programming languages by Google mentions

Stacked

Run newLISP scripts easily

10 quotes about newLISP from the internet

Come back soon!

Comment from bob bae

Comment from newlisper

Comment from Anonymous

Comment from newlisper

Recent posts on unbalanced-parentheses

All posts on unbalanced-parentheses