Lessons from Coleslaw
Tagged as lisp
Written on 2013-01-06 14:40:00
Is there anything more pointless than a new blog engine? Probably not. 4 months ago, I wouldn't have thought that I would be distracted from my Lisp 6502 emulator so long or that I'd have this much fun writing blogware. It is amazing, however, just how much you can do with a bit of time and ~600 lines of lisp.
Lately I've come to realize my favorite part of hobby programming is that I essentially treat it as creative writing. One of the reasons I love Lisp and find myself using it so much for hobby code is how easily it enables me to experiment with new coding styles. In Coleslaw's case, this has meant a stronger focus on CLOS and API design.
I like to think there's a clear stylistic shift in my projects, from the earlier and messy imperative of Paktahn, through the neat but overly macro-heavy cl-scrobbler, to the more balanced style of my present day code. It's no surprise that some of my favorite lisp luminaries, Peter Seibel and Luke Gorrie, talk a lot about code as literature and readable programs. Hopefully, I will continue to progress in that tradition.
Coleslaw 0.8 is hereby released. The biggest features are multi-site publishing and support for new content types. Here is an example bookmark or tweet-like content type that may ship in a future release, Shouts. See the NEWS for further details. It's time to get back to Memory Mappers for a bit and see if I can't get actual NES emulation going in pure Common Lisp. See you next time, Planet Lisp.
Unless otherwise credited all material 
by Brit Butler 