Practical Common LISP by Peter Seibel

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Just what Common Lisp needed: a book that doesn’t bubble at the mouth, frothing over how every other language is attempting to be CL but failing; a book that doesn’t tell you how macros mean you can write EVERY LANGUAGE EVER in CL; a book that doesn’t tell you how CL’s macros are the best thing since sliced bread, then follow it up with totally shit examples of what macros are actually used for; a book that actually tours the standard library in a semi-sensical fashion, and covers practical things you might actually want to do, and in the meantime does a pretty decent justice to the rather large language that is Common Lisp.

In short, a rather good book, suitable for total beginners to Lisp and Common Lisp.

I found that it lost traction at times—sometimes it degenerated into a little bit of a reference, and you felt like you were reading a dictionary—but fairly quickly it recovered and had your attention again (while still being didactic). Similarly, the practicals in the last few chapters were almost too well-architected; I really just felt like I was building the target application, sort of learning the techniques, but ultimately it wasn’t necessarily interesting.

Finally, the topics glossed over in the conclusion are probably more important to someone wanting to build real applications with Common Lisp (i.e. relating to “practical Common Lisp”) than some of the stuff that could probably be gleaned from an evening with the HyperSpec—finding libraries and deploying applications are two very big question marks for any Lisp developer. This is partly a result of developments in these areas being even more recent than the book (e.g. QuickLisp development began in 2010, after the book’s last copyright year of 2009).

All in all, an excellent introduction to the world of Common Lisp.

Go — awesome. Lack of support for “generics” kinda sucks. (list mapping sucks) []interface{} is useless sometimes. Damnit, I really just want a map function.
Haskell — lovely. Hard to get things to “just work” sometimes due to fun inherent in IO/monads.
OCaml — great. Haskell without the monad crap, but a crappier syntax. begin/end blocks uglify much. Try to go too functional and you run into the limitations of impurity.

The previous post is a message to myself, so I don’t need to justify it. But I’ll justify it here for anyone else:

These are the experiences of my gender I always wanted but never had. Like anything you identify with, there are these moments where you realise that you’re experiencing some fundamental part of that identity which makes you feel like you’re really a part of it. And for me, this is part of it.

You know what’s an awesome combination for a summer’s night?

Lying on your bed with your skirt down to your knees, stripy socks keeping your legs comfortable (and hair hidden!), liking who you are and how you feel.

Lots of love,

Not Afraid To Say Things Just As They Are

I have an issue which maybe will one day not be so dire.

Advance warning: I’m talking about sex, and specifically my behaviours regarding it, so you may regard part of this as “TMI”. Reader discretion is advised.

As you may know, my (wider) moods are largely dictated by cyclothymia, a mood disorder which shares a spectrum with bipolar. I didn’t really realise fully myself my own nature until I came to live with my friend, Alex. He’d heard about my problems for years prior to then, but once we were living together, regularly going for walks together, he started to tell me more and more about the patterns he was seeing.

I’ve certainly come a long way since then, in terms of managing my behaviour. That’s not to say I let the label define me, but nonetheless I take certain precautions when I understand that my mood is taking a turn (for no other reason that it wants to—and that is the frustrating thing), and usually my life isn’t taken apart by myself once I start to come back up.

Unfortunately, sexual drive is nearly impossible to regulate, as I’m messed up no matter what mood I’m in. As in any depressive state, I have nearly zero interest in sex when I’m in a down period. The thought never enters my mind, and if raised by my partner, it feels (to me) like she’s talking about something that’s just not installed. The concept makes sense, but actually doing anything like that? On reflection, it seems crazy just how asexual I feel. I guess I didn’t really realise that could happen to me, until I realise it does, all the time (eg. now!).

Of course, when I’m up, it’s a different thing, and it’s even more problematic. I don’t experience mania per se, but something like that watered down. Correspondingly, my sex drive increases. So too do my hormone levels (or my awareness thereof). So, too does my feeling of acute dysphoria. I know exactly how I’d like my body to feel, to myself, and it feels in so many ways the polar opposite. Disgusting is a word I rarely have need to use seriously, but I really do feel that way about myself at these times, because of my sex drive.

And thus it occurs that it’s really hard for me to enjoy what should otherwise be a nice way to bond with my partner, and sometimes difficult to live with myself.

My programming lately has sort of stagnated; not (entirely) in the traditional sense that I’ve just stopped or lost the inspiration, but that I tend to have been doing lots of smallish or trivial things that maybe don’t actually warrant my time.

The most recent project was writing the Erlang::Parser module for Perl, now distributed on the CPAN. This was a really great way to get to grips with Perl, Moose, and another excuse to write a parser. The resulting module may also prove handy in my line of work, where it might be beneficial to extend Erlang’s syntax with our own additions without having to modify Erlang’s own parser. I also wanted an excuse to have a module on CPAN, and I hope this isn’t the last module I release there.

While it was fun, and a lovely result for the test case—verifying that all of MochiWeb parses correctly—to finally pass on CPAN Testers, the original purpose for which I wanted to parse Erlang code has now gone.

I was toying around with an idea for an OS that implemented Erlang-style light-weight processes with mailboxes (and little else) as the core process type. Rather than inventing a new syntax, or indeed, language, I thought it might also be an idea to parse Erlang (which I thought couldn’t be that hard).

First, I started a prototype in Go, then decided I’d do a quicker and hackier one in Ruby; I cooked my own lexer, and my own not-very-LALR(1) parser generator, but ran out of steam shortly after my home-grown parser started having to deal with precedence issues—or not deal, as it ended up. When my Perl proficiency started to pick up, I started pawing through the Parse:: namespace and realised, in the Perl spirit of things, that I could build on some giants’ shoulders and probably end up with a parser in short order. Thus was born Erlang::Parser.

The first release of E::P such that one of its then 3 modules would end up being module #100,000, at least according to the small count in the lower-left corner of search.cpan.org. From what I could tell, I think I was successful; I uploaded E::P 0.1 to PAUSE when the number read 99,999; it updates quite slowly, but the next update was 100,002, so it was either E::P, or some other 3-module distribution that made #10⁵.

I couldn’t leave the job half finished; even if it did parse enough Erlang at 0.1 to suit my needs, I wanted to do the job properly, now that it was on the CPAN. So I selected MochiWeb as the test case, assuming it would end up using every syntactic quirk of the language at least once. 0.2 ended up being able to fully parse (and verify that it did so to some degree of correctness) MochiWeb.

Now I was parsing code correctly, but the interface of E::P sucked; the AST nodes were just arrays, with the first element being a string describing the type of node, and the remaining elements differing (somewhat arbitrarily) according thereto. If I wanted the module to be really usable (and maintainable), I’d have to make the node types better defined. So I learned to cook a Moose, and then OO-ified the AST nodes. I also spent a lot of time writing POD for every node kind, which I’m glad I did now. That was 0.3. 0.4 was including the Parse::Yapp-generated parser in the distribution, as my Makefile.PL-fu is weak and most CPAN Tester reports were failing due to the generated parser’s absence.

A bit before that, I was enjoying exercising in Golang, and so a few weeks’ spare time were spent writing enwd, a Go DNS server. The name is a pun(?): ‘enw’ is Welsh for ‘name’, and the most popular DNS servers tend to be referred to as ‘named’ (name daemon). Getting things like compression was an exercise in following RFCs.

enwd still seems to disagree with some upstream servers, and doesn’t support recursion, but otherwise it’s a fully functional DNS server. The only thing it lacks is a sufficient administration interface to actually create the zone (!). My plan was for it to support interactive zone editing via HTTP—which it has the beginnings of—but doing that kind of front-end UI work for me is, frankly, pretty boring.

I pushed myself along for a bit, but commits become fewer and further between. The work stopped once I was in the thick of the admin interface.

Other recent-ish projects include golex, a lexical analyser-generator for Go (which makes use of Go’s nifty Go parser and AST manipulation libraries—a must for any language worth its salt!), kotaete, a not too-seriously open-sourced project in PHP which I used to quiz friends on which baby names they preferred.. and somehow not too much else. I suppose HaeSeun also counts—her source isn’t open, however.

The more I look at this paltry(!) list, the more I wonder where my time has been going.. outside of work, family, Loki, etc. I made a few abortive attempts at reviving very old game ideas, and messed around a bit with programming language ideas. Really, though, I’ve been gearing so much thought towards systems programming.

Rob Pike’s “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant” talk from 2000 continues to exact as much of an effect on my thoughts about the subject as it did when I first read the slides (the contention of which, if you hadn’t guessed it, is other to that which the title suggests). See page 6: the software and language stacks we used in 1990 (Unix, X Windows, Emacs, TCP/IP, C, C++) were still used in 2000, with the addition of Netscape, Java, and a little Perl. What’s changed in 2011? Netscape lives on as Firefox, and programming languages fade out of and back into obscurity. The web has probably been the single biggest change in ‘software’ since 2000, which is fitting (with regards to the talk) as it actually largely escapes the realm of the concerns of systems software. I still think systems software research is really important.

In a future post¹, I’ll expand on why I’m thinking that microkernels will probably be a large part of how I choose to spend my free time. I want to stop frittering away my spare time on aimless (though fun) projects, and start trying to actually stretch my creativity, and maybe make something novel while I do it.

A little bit of confusion seems to exist around what gender identity disorder (GID) is. As label-avoidant as I am, this is one that seems to be here to stay.

Recently, a few people have (accidentally?) made clear how they feel about it—or at least, what they think it is—which has been an interesting experience.

One person (who’s known about me identifying as at least gender dysphoric since I was 8 years old¹ or so) said, “but so what does [your wife] think about all this?”, and it turned out that the assumption was that, seeing as I married a girl, and am now a father, it means that I must have acceded to the role as a husband² and father by taking on my biologically conferred masculinity with open arms and .. I don’t know, doing something very manly with it. Crushing it under my bicep? Or something.

Another was encouraging of my writing web log³ posts on the topic if it helped me fix the problem sooner; this again seemed an interesting way to view the “issue”.

I guess my point in writing this now is to say that I don’t think this is something that necessarily will have a close. I wrote a letter to my mother to tell her about my feelings in ’05 or ’06:

I am a girl.

Here is the severity of what I feel: just writing that gives me an inner release, something that I could never have felt before. Just seeing that which I have written, right there, displaying it so plainly for anyone to see; it gives me a feeling of inner peace. Here’s Chloe⁴ on my lap; I’ll whisper it into her ear: Chloe, I’m a girl like you.

I feel gender dysphoria: like the (physical) sex assigned to me does not correspond to my (mental) gender. I can’t think of how many times people have told me that I’m effeminate, but that’s exactly the way that I feel on the inside, if not much, much stronger. It makes me feel uncomfortable to have this mismatch, and it’s been getting much, much worse.

That bit above about seven years wasn’t exactly true; a white lie. The first time I thought about girls in this way; not the way that pubescent boys think about them, or the ways that most typical teenagers, either; the way that I wanted to actually be one, and mingle with them, and be accepted as a peer, was ten years ago; 1996, prep. I can recall not much from my early days of school; but the strong feeling that something wasn’t right is something I can.

In 1999, in grade four, all of seven years ago, I distinctly remember thinking to myself; I wish I was a girl … The way I want to act around other people is the opposite of how I’m supposed to, and (almost) every day feels jarring as a result.

Yay, teenaged me! This was right in the middle of a long-ish letter I wrote to my mother (after a lot of text trying to outline that I was being serious), and I suppose that was a turning point: for the first time I actually discussed gender issues with.. anyone, really, and happily, it was with someone who would take the time to understand me and help me with it.

Twice, I nearly went down the road of actually transitioning physically. To date, I’m still not sure if I regret not following through. Had I done so, I’m sure I’d probably have the same lack of certainty about what I’d done. Damned if I do; damned if I don’t. All I can do is cater one way, or cater another. More ambiguity? Maybe.

So. More of that.

Perchance this will help someone.

I had fun (no, I didn’t) getting wpa_supplicant working on Arch Linux. I kept getting “deauthenticated from c0:50:8a:99:d6:40 (Reason: 6)”.

The answer was that netcfg was defaulting to giving wpa_supplicant the nl80211 driver as well as wext (-D nl80221,wext).

Adding WPA_DRIVER=“wext” to /etc/network.d/interfaces/wlan0 fixed the issue.

Note to self: keep on truckin’.

Some “aha” moments reading s.e. smith’s “Beyond the Binary: What to Wear, What to Wear”. Quoting:

One way to degender clothing is to see more inclusion of femme nonbinary people on sites dedicated to nonbinary fashion and identity. To celebrate femme transgender people and to showcase us in all our glory instead of hiding us away and telling us we don’t belong. For masculine genderqueer people to wear dresses when they feel like it instead of being afraid to do so because they worry about the messages it might send. To see more people who might be read on the surface as ‘male’ in skirts and dresses, heels and pearls, with fabulous hair, this would be a good thing that would break people out of the belief that the only way to do nonbinary ‘right’ is to do it in a masculine way, with men’s clothing, with breasts bound.

Clothing is such a complicated thing, and it is so coded and layered with meaning, that we can become quite snarled and tangled in it. Every now and then I convince myself that I should be wearing more clothes designed for men and I go and try some on and look dreadful, because they aren’t cut for my body, and I end up resenting my body, instead of the society that makes me feel like my body is wrong. Or the clothing manufacturers who cut clothing in very specific and limited ways. Or the community that makes it impossible for tailored clothing for queer folks to really be an option; there are places I could go in San Francisco to find clothing that will fit mybody, but I can’t find that clothing here because the stores that might be willing to stock it couldn’t sell enough of it to justify the expense.

I’m not too sure where I can say I fit into the gender spectrum; part of the reason, I suspect, is that I’m a bit shy to the terms “transgender” and more specifically, “transsexual.” It’s not a lack of willingness to accede to what it means to be TS, but instead underlying feelings of doubt and .. shame? I had a chance to start a transition in earnest years ago, and I gave it up! I’m married (to a cissexual woman) in a traditional nuclear family! How could I possibly be a girl? You’re kidding right?

In turn, I say: “oh, boy, i guess you’re right.” And then I sulk away and try to forget it all ’til I next find myself sliding off into despair somewhere and realise I can’t just ignore this.

Short on time, but in closing: how nice to wear a dress!