I took this up when I had to setup a bunch of NLP pipelines for work and this does stand true to its name - it is a quick and practical index into approaches, introductory theory and useful libraries for the same.

I don’t like reading text books at a stretch due to several reasons:- “cross a bridge, when you get to it” is something that has stood the test of time for me when it comes to reading practical books. I don’t find it useful to read stuff without the doing if that is what the book is intended for.

What makes lisp so unique is the way its code is structured - you definitely can’t miss all those parentheses. In this section of the series, I discuss the cause for such a representation and how that makes lisp unique in terms of how it views its code as data as code (aka homo-iconicity).

Further reading

• Python disassembler
• Homoiconity
• Byte Code
• S-expressions
• Common Operator Notation
• Abstract Syntax Tree
• The Blub Paradox

Call to collaborate

If you’re someone who shares the dream of making lisp popular and mainstream so that we can use it for our jobs and don’t have to switch to blubs to make a living (without denting its charm of course) , consider contributing to the notes and hit me up via mail or any of the other media I’m present on.

This is an auxilliary post collating resources for the recent video I posted …

The Pipeline

1. All the ideas, resources that I want to process, any miscellaneous questions I have, are fed into the input-queue in the buffer
2. All the manipulation takes place in these buffers - they’re org-files and I use org-roam to maintain the connections
3. whenever a node set ripens and is worth sharing, I write a post or publish a video.
4. It can go both ways : I can force a set into maturity if I wish to publish something specific or I may chance upon a concept when observing connections.

Observations

I use org-roam-ui to visualize the buffer and check for linkages that might result in something useful. I also want to publish this graph (demonstrated in video) but there’s no explicit solution for that yet and I’m planning to build one myself with rust and webassembly as a compilation target.

This is the first in a series of blog posts that follow the educational common lisp series on my youtube channel as an auxilliary.

I’ll be summarizing the videos in these blogs and be using these to point to references and additional resources that further elaborate the matter.

In memory of the author of vim, arguably the most influential programming utility ever…

Here is a paper : “ Seven habits of effective text editing ” by him that I hope continues to inspire programmers, as it did me when I was a novice.

[As of 0x213B : 2023-08-17 Thu]

I use emacs for a lot of my daily tasks and spend majority of my time in it. This is a review of some significant components of my init.el

;keyboard all the way
(menu-bar-mode -1)
(tool-bar-mode -1)
(scroll-bar-mode -1)

;I don't like distractions
(setq byte-compile-warnings '(cl-functions))
(setq ring-bell-function 'ignore)
(setq visible-bell t)

I chose the most recently engineered package-management solution when I began with emacs, haven’t switched since and don’t think I’ll need to. Migrating from vim, I preferred a configuration file rather than installations via melpa interface. Also, freezing and thawing is cool : exact reproducibility is guaranteed.

Given I’ve passed through SICP once, quickly grasping common lisp to build stuff and explore the traditional and industrial aspects of lisp (I know clojure exists but traditional…) was my next objective: with decent speed and only solving the somewhat involved exercises, it took me two weeks to complete this book.

The exercises aren’t meant to be a challenge but to adapt to the environment and the topics introduced. The book does not explore concepts with depth (CLOS, macros, etc…) but that shouldn’t be the objective of an introduction anyway.

There’s a better way to do it - Find it.
Thomas Alva Edison

Managing one’s intellectual appetite in these times of information (and noise) excess is quite an ordeal. Given superior tooling and methods to plough through dense knowledge forests, coming up with the right set of tools for oneself is still a commendable task. In this post, I sketch out how one could go about making such choices practically, from why you should bother, to what tangible actions you can get started with.

If you wish to be a writer, write. Epictetus

A Brief History

I took up writing as a hobby in the sophomore year of my bachelors and it turned out to be the most definitive step towards bettering my way with words and expressing myself accurately.

This is the fourth major iteration on my blogging system and I’ve noticed that I’m slowly tending towards minimalism and an overall clutter-free approach with each step, building up from my past stylistic mistakes and experiences. As with any beginner, I began with enthusiasm and held my ideas in high regard - a major reason for why I felt they should be out there. Over time, as I read more, I learned I had a lot more to learn and finally after a long break of writing frequently, here I am again, at symbolic ground zero - drafting a first post.