Top all-time · #846
Abstract Heresies
Personal blog · funcall.blogspot.comprogrammingai
Abstract Heresies is a personal blog at funcall.blogspot.com about programming and ai. Since 2009, 79 different Hacker News readers have linked it 116 times, most often “Not Lisp again (2009)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-24, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Not Lisp again (2009)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2017-05-02
- First-class environments3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-09-24
- Not Lisp again....3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-03-05
- Joe Marshall's take on Guido Van Rossum's post on tail recursion3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2009-04-25
- Tail Recursion and Debugging (2011)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-03-30
- C++ vs. Lisp or JRM vs. Ebhakt2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-05-04
- Pseudo, a Common Lisp macro for pseudocode expressions2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-07-28
- Some Lisp Machine Minutia2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-04-10
- llambda.lisp: Bare-Metal, Multi-Threaded, AVX2-Accelerated LLM inf eng in CL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-07-13
- Vibe Coding in Common Lisp2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-03-24
What Hacker News says?
This is such a great thread, I'm excited to begin reading quite a few of the linked blogs (such as this one: https://acoup.blog/ ). These ones are some of my favorites: - www.wall.org/~aron/blog/ (physics, theology, history, philosophy) - http://xahlee.info/ (math, emacs, keyboards, etc.) - https://matt.might.net/articles/ (academy, compsci, etc.) - https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ (programming, companies, etc.) - ht…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Favorite Blogs by Individuals?”Submitted Not Lisp again (2009) as a story · 403 points
HN discussionJoe Marshall had a couple of posts about... No: https://funcall.blogspot.com/2025/05/vibe-coding-common-lisp...
Comment linking /2025/05/vibe-coding-common-lisp-through-back.html
on “Agentic Coding Recommendations”Submitted Why I Program in Lisp as a story · 286 points
HN discussionIt's a lovely blog series, worth delving into other bits and pieces. This one is particularly relevant. Tail-call optimsiation _not_ implemented and why. Usually the sort of thing that is not mentioned when celebrating all the good fun of lisp. https://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/04/lmi-flashback.html
Comment linking /2009/04/lmi-flashback.html
on “Not Lisp again (2009)”Submitted Not Lisp again (2009) as a story · 266 points
HN discussionMy concern is that "practicality" is often just a code word for "resembles Java or whatever else I was comfortable with so I can continue on doing what I've always done before." (With the result that the student learns less than if they were required to do something truly different.) Reminds me of this post that came up on HN not too long ago: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/03/not-lisp-again.html
Comment linking /2009/03/not-lisp-again.html
on “Why MIT switched from Scheme to Python”Submitted Not Lisp again (2009) as a story · 246 points
HN discussionWow, you're daft. Everything is, ultimately, getting turned into machine code. Not even Lisp Machines could get away from this fundamental fact: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/04/some-lisp-machine-minuti... > Bogus objects — properly tagged words with invalid addresses that pointed at uninitialized memory or into the middle of object of a different type — which would cause the GC to corrupt memory would be left in…
Comment linking /2009/04/some-lisp-machine-minutia.html
on “GnuTLS considered harmful (2008)”Submitted Not Lisp again.... as a story · 178 points
HN discussionThe classic issue of who made the first tongs could be inserted here, with some hammering. (It's a classic legend. There is an Islamic legend that Allah gave the first pair of tongs to the first blacksmith because you need a pair of tongs to make a pair of tongs. There's a Nordic legend that Thor made the first tongs. In reality, somebody probably used a bent piece of green wood, which didn't last long, but could be…
Comment linking /2025/04/vibe-coding-final-word.html
on “Blacksmithing and Lisp”Submitted Blacksmithing and Lisp as a story · 159 points
HN discussionWorth reading only if "because ignorance" is useful knowledge to you. In any case, you'd be better off starting at http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-knew-id-say-somethin... , which tries to clear up some of the misconceptions Guido was laboring under at the time.
Comment linking /2009/04/you-knew-id-say-something.html
on “What happened to proper tail calls in JavaScript? (2021)”Submitted Fold-... and Monoids as a story · 103 points
HN discussionA couple of years ago I finally started to understand the Waters series facility [1], which was offered as an alternative to Loop. It's a bit finicky, and the error messages are often mystifying, but I have come to quite like it for some more complicated looping situations. The thing that finally made it accessible to me was a blog post by Joe Marshall, Series tips and tricks [2] Ironically enough, once my use of it…
Comment linking /2022/07/series-tips-and-tricks.html
on “Štar: an iteration construct for Common Lisp”Submitted I hate Lisp as a story · 96 points
HN discussionThis post does a really good job of analyzing first-class environments and explaining why "first-class environments are useless at best, and dangerous at worst": http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/09/first-class-environments...
Comment linking /2009/09/first-class-environments.html
on “Modern Language Wishlist”Submitted Early Lisp Part II as a story · 82 points
HN discussionI'm pretty sure the title is tongue in cheek, and would be more accurately rendered as "I hated lisp when I first had to learn it", considering e.g. the name of the blog, and posts like these with considerable lispy content. http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/01/day-4-part-1.html I hate explaining a joke as much as anyone but it seems that it's gone over some heads.
Comment linking /2009/01/day-4-part-1.html
on “I hate Lisp”Submitted Can continuation passing style code perform well? as a story · 81 points
HN discussionAlso, this blog post (which did the rounds on HN a while back) was excellent for understanding it: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/04/you-knew-id-say-somethin... (It's part of a 5 part series... but you don't have to necessarily read all of them... it kind of wanders.)
Comment linking /2009/04/you-knew-id-say-something.html
on “SICP in Clojure (In Progress)”- TY · 2009-04-25
Submitted Joe Marshall's take on Guido Van Rossum's post on tail recursion as a story · 74 points
HN discussion Non-mobile link: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2021/04/early-lisp-part-ii-apply...
Comment linking /2021/04/early-lisp-part-ii-apply-redux.html
on “Early Lisp Part II”Submitted Pseudo, a Common Lisp macro for pseudocode expressions as a story · 73 points
HN discussion> Java has the Vector type, which allows for sequences of dynamically varying length The Vector type in Java has been not best practice since Java 1.5 when the Collections framework came out. In particular, the Java 1.4 days and before all of the collection classes were synchronized leading to some not insignificant performance hits (even in single threaded applications). ArrayList and LinkedList are the classes tha…
Comment linking /2009/09/first-class-environments.html
on “Is Lisp Still Unique? Or at Least Different? (2002)”Submitted Confessions of a Math Idiot as a story · 72 points
HN discussionEither that, or in the (rather limited) machine language the processor supports. But there is no push to solve this in a particular way. Here is an article about the Lisp Machine's garbage collection: http://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/05/before-i-got-distracted-...
Comment linking /2009/05/before-i-got-distracted-by-tail.html
on “The Cons Microprocessor [pdf]”Submitted An early Lisp program (circa Feb. 1960) as a story · 63 points
HN discussionAnd indeed, in Scheme (the language that originally made tail recursion famous) you can get stack traces from loops too! Well, at least in one Scheme implementation, MIT Scheme. The MIT Scheme debugger has a notion of "reductions and subproblems" [1], which basically correspond to tail calls and non-tail calls. You can step "backwards" to the previous reduction, or "upwards" to the previous subproblem. In terms of o…
Comment linking /2009/05/you-knew-id-say-something-part-iv.html
on “Tail Recursion and Debugging (2011)”Submitted Tail Recursion and Debugging (2011) as a story · 59 points
HN discussion
