Planet Lisp

When I did interviews for Google, one of my go-to interview questions was to ask the candidate to determine if someone had won a game of tic-tac-toe. The candidate could choose the board representation and the language to use; I just wanted to see them write the code that checked for a winner. Inevitably, the candidate would choose a 2D array to represent the board. They...

Git has a built-in persistent store for objects based on Merkle trees. It is tailored to store files and directories, but these are just specializations of trees of blobs. There is no reason it couldn't be used to store Lisp objects.

Githack is a Lisp object sto...

Why write boilerplate code when you can ask an LLM can do it for you? But even LLMs will avoid boilerplate if they can. I recently vibe coded a rogue-like game in Common Lisp. While I gave the model specific directions at certain points, I mostly let the model generate the code as it saw fit. I found some interesting suprises in the generated code.

One feature of...

I was talking with Amit Patel of Red Blob Games the other day and he mentioned that he had been participating in a programming endeavor where people were creating variations of rogue-like games based on a

I belong to the blank generation and
I can take it or leave it each time, well
I belong to the _ generation but
I can take it or leave it each time.

My destructuring-match macro has a notion of ‘blank’ variables: any varia...