Join devRant
Do all the things like
++ or -- rants, post your own rants, comment on others' rants and build your customized dev avatar
Sign Up
Pipeless API

From the creators of devRant, Pipeless lets you power real-time personalized recommendations and activity feeds using a simple API
Learn More
Search - "environment files"
-
!rant
For all of youse that ever wanted to try out Common Lisp and do not know where to start (but are interested in getting some knowledge of Common Lisp) I recommend two things:
As an introductory tutorial:
https://lisperati.com/casting.html/
And as your dev environment:
https://portacle.github.io/
Notice that the dev environment in question is Emacs, regardless of how you might feel about it as a text editor, i can recommend just going through the portacle help that gives you some basic starting points regarding editing. Learn about splitting buffers, evaluating the code you are typing in order for it to appear in the Common Lisp REPL (this one comes with an environment known as SLIME which is very popular in the Lisp world) as well as saving and editing your files.
Portacle is self contained inside of one single directory, so if you by any chance already have an Emacs environment then do not worry, Portacle will not touch any of that. I will admit that as far as I am concerned, Emacs will probably be the biggest hurdle for most people not used to it.
Can I use VS Code? Yes, yes you can, but I am not familiar with setting up a VSCode dev environment for Emacs, or any other environment hat comes close to the live environment that emacs provides for this?
Why the fuck should I try Common Lisp or any Lisp for that matter? You do not have to, I happen to like it a lot and have built applications at work with a different dialect of Lisp known as Clojure which runs in the JVM, do I recommend it? Yeah I do, I love functional programming, Clojure is pretty pure on that (not haskell level imo though, but I am not using Haskell for anything other than academic purposes) and with clojure you get the entire repertoire of Java libraries at your disposal. Moving to Clojure was cake coming from Common Lisp.
Why Common Lisp then if you used Clojure in prod? Mostly historical reasons, I want to just let people know that ANSI Common Lisp has a lot of good things going for it, I selected Clojure since I already knew what I needed from the JVM, and parallelism and concurrency are baked into Clojure, which was a priority. While I could have done the same thing in Common Lisp, I wanted to turn in a deliverable as quickly as possible rather than building the entire thing by myself which would have taken longer (had one week)
Am I getting something out of learning Common Lisp? Depends on you, I am not bringing about the whole "it opens your mind" deal with Lisp dialects as most other people do inside of the community, although I did experience new perspectives as to what programming and a programming language could do, and had fun doing it, maybe you will as well.
Does Lisp stands for Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses or Los in stupid parentheses? Yes, also for Lost of Insidious Silly Parentheses and Lisp is Perfect, use paredit (comes with Portacle) also, Lisp stands for Lisp Is Perfect. None of that List Processing bs, any other definition will do.
Are there any other books? Yes, the famous online text Practical Common Lisp can be easily read online for free, I would recommend the Lisperati tutorial first to get a feel for it since PCL demands more tedious study. There is also Common Lisp a gentle introduction. If you want to go the Clojure route try Clojure for the brave and true.
What about Scheme and the Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs? Too academic for my taste, and if in Common Lisp you have to do a lot of things on your own, Scheme is a whole other beast. Simple and beautiful really, but I go for practical in terms of Lisp, thus I prefer Common Lisp.
how did you start with Lisp?
I was stupid and thought I should start with it after a failed attempt at learning C++, then Java, and then Javascript when I started programming years ago. I was overwhelmed, but I continued. Then I moved to other things. But always kept Common Lisp close to heart. I am also heavy into A.I, Lisp has a history there and it is used in a lot of new and sort of unknown projects dealing with Knowledge Reasoning and representation. It is also Alien tech that contains many things that just seem super interesting to me such as treating code as data and data as code (back-quoting, macros etc)
I need some inspiration man......show me something? Sure, look for a game called Kandria in youtube, the creator, Shimera (Nicolas Hafner) is an absolute genius in the world of Lisp and a true inspiration. He coded the game in Common Lisp, he is also the person behind portacle. If that were not enough, he might very well also be Shirakumo, another prominent member of the Common Lisp Community.
Ok, you got me, what is the first thing in common lisp that I should try after I install the portacle environment? go to the repl and evaluate this:
(+ 0.1 0.2)
Watch in awe at what you get.
In the truest and original sense of the phrase (MIT based) "happy hacking!"10 -
gradle is infuriating.
firstly there are so limited resources to understand how it's building a java/android code. everything happens by magic and hit+trial
secondly the plugins and the tasks works in mysterious ways. sometime they work when applied in the project root's gradle file, other times they work when applied in module's gradle file, nd other times they need configuration at both levels.
then there are gradle tasks like build ,test, assemble , clean etc. these are less of an action and more of an alias to run a bundle of actions.
then we have 3rd party plugins which attach themselves to these "fat-actions" and run before/after them
and finally we have the fuckup from the java world where the only available code coverage plugin is jacoco and IT FUCKING SUCKS!!! it is a test environment plugin, it should impact test tasks , but somehow it's fucking with the assemble taskin such a manner, that the jars ans aar files generated via plugin are giving runtime errrors. yes , runtime! as if we are back in the messed up js world of "everything is good unless running live"
even if it was a compile time eeror, i would have considered. but runtime?!! fucking runtime error?! i barely understand this shit, there is absolutely no info available as to which classes are being used to create a build and how, and i am supposed to fix this? wtf?!4 -
A jr dev was having an issue registering code with our data pipeline (prefect self hosted).
Turns out he's running vscode to launch a anaconda shell (didn't even know that was a thing) to launch jupyter notebook and running commands in the notebook (didn't know that was possible) all from Windows.
No it doesn't work. His environment configuration isn't right. I told him to just run Linux and get rid of all that nonsense.
Nothing is on git yet and were three weeks in! His code is full of hard coded absolute paths of files on his hard drive... He even had an example app to go buy, with a project layout to copy.
There's no helping some people9 -
Despite already having a few years of professional experience dealing with Linux servers, I still, to this day, confuse, which environment file gets sourced and when...
There's /etc/profile, /etc/bashrc, ~/.bash_profile, ~/.profile, ~/.bashrc
I think it's... Bashrc for interactive shells, profile for login shells.
But then I have examples like "ssh user@server 'echo $var'" that... Don't source any of the files!
You can enable user environment files for SSH that get sourced whenever a user logs on through SSH (~/.ssh/environment / environment specified for a key in ~/.ssh/authorized_keys)
Is there some sort of master environment file that gets sourced *every* time, no matter what kind of shell starts?1