Top all-time · #9766
Mike Schaeffer
Personal blog · mschaef.com/blogprogrammingsystems
Mike Schaeffer's personal blog at mschaef.com covers programming and systems. Since 2008, 8 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “CAR, CDR, and Lisp...”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-21, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Commenters link Mike Schaeffer's posts on Lisp, car/cdr, and Linux, and on reviving old Lisp code. The comments cite, correct a link to, or respond to these posts without judging their writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- CAR, CDR, and Lisp...3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2008-02-15
What Hacker News says?
> It feels like the industry quickly moved beyond the reach of the "hobbyist". There were no more "clever tricks" to be employed It happened in a matter of a few years. The Apple II was built as a machine capable of running Breakout in software. Woz picked the 6502 (originally for the Apple One) because he could afford it. It wasn't that long after that Commodore released the C64. They chose the 6502 because they'd…
Comment linking /c64
on “Steve Wozniak: Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about happiness”Submitted CAR, CDR, and Lisp... as a story · 55 points
HN discussion> I've heard this repeatedly over the years, but the explanation unfortunately always stops right there. Lisp macros are something like C macros, chainsaws, hydrochloric acid, or anything else that's powerful-but-dangerous. This is to say that sometimes they are the one tool you have to use, but often they are unnecessary and should be avoided. Coming up on ten years ago, I wrote this blog post on one of the dangers…
Comment linking /blog/tech/lisp/defmacro-coupling.html
on “GNU Guile 2.2.0”- mk · 2008-02-14
Submitted Car, Cdr, and Lisp... as a story · 8 points
HN discussion Back in 1983, my elementary school was a part of a Logo pilot program. We had a lab of Commodore 64's that I had free run of (my mom was a teacher there), and it's why I do what I do all these years later. What I find interesting it that it's not just programming, specifically. Logo is a highly interactive and dynamic language (a relative of Lisp), and that influenced the way I think about writing code. Seymour Pape…
Comment linking /c64
on “Logo Programming”Submitted Commodore Amiga Marketing (2005) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionWindows has had clipboard format negotiation since the beginning. When an application copies data into the clipboard, it can do so in multiple formats. Each format can be rendered either eagerly or lazily by the application putting data into the clipboard. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms6... Applications that wish to get data from the clipboard can then enumerate the available formats and…
Comment linking /blog/tech/excel/what_is_in_your_clipboard.txt
on “What ever happened to Wordstar?”Submitted Anaphoric Macros in Emacs Lisp as a story · 1 points
HN discussionI'm still struggling with my own legacy code problem. I'm reviving an old LISP program from the early 1980s. Parts of it were written for the original Stanford AI Lab SAIL system in the 1970s. It last ran under Franz LISP in 1986. My current struggle is with one line of code: (defun getenode (l) (cadr l)) That ought to be simple enough. But it's being applied not to a list, but a "hunk". A "hunk" is an obsolete MacL…
Comment linking /blog/tech/lisp/car-cdr.html
on “What Happens When You Mix Java with a 1960 IBM Mainframe”At least in my experience, macros are really an escape hatch of last resort, and for the reasons you mention. Semi-related: http://www.mschaef.com/defmacro-coupling
Comment linking /defmacro-coupling
on “Why I'm Tcl-Ish”> APL notation makes more sense once you get...... APL is way more regular... With it's small set of special symbols, regular syntax and human-friendly infix notation APL is designed be very easy to learn....It looks utterly alien to programmers that are used to the C-style syntax based languages, yes. As you might guess from my original post, I'm a Lisp apologist. I like the syntax and I can make an argument for Li…
Comment linking /lisp-syntax
on “Array languages vs. the curse of the spreadsheet”What I was trying to say here is that Linux advocacy is still very much in its infancy, and of zero complexity. Linux, as an entire operating system, and not just as a kernel, really needs a strong steward with a vision if it is ever going to be beaten into something that is a cohesive single thing, and not a loose aggregation of software packages. Unfortunately, by the time most people learn and know enough to beco…
Comment linking /linux-haters-blog
on “Upgrade to Linux”Are you sure you didn't mean to point to http://www.mschaef.com/blog/tech/lisp/car-cdr.html ?
Comment linking /blog/tech/lisp/car-cdr.html
on “Car, Cdr, and Lisp...”https://www.mschaef.com Technical blog covering a range of topics. Some ongoing focus on Lisp/Clojure and recent musings on personal computing in the 80's and 90's.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”
