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.