This is the first in a series of blog posts that follow the educational common lisp series on my youtube channel as an auxilliary. I’ll be summarizing the videos in these blogs and be using these to point to references and additional resources that further elaborate the matter. This post is about why you should consider learning common lisp and how I intend to execute the plan of building an end to end resource index while simultaneously being able to learn more about the language myself.

In memory of the author of vim, arguably the most influential programming utility ever… Here is a paper : “ Seven habits of effective text editing ” by him that I hope continues to inspire programmers, as it did me when I was a novice.

[As of 0x213B : 2023-08-17 Thu] I use emacs for a lot of my daily tasks and spend majority of my time in it. This is a review of some significant components of my init.el ;keyboard all the way (menu-bar-mode -1) (tool-bar-mode -1) (scroll-bar-mode -1) ;I don't like distractions (setq byte-compile-warnings '(cl-functions)) (setq ring-bell-function 'ignore) (setq visible-bell t) I chose the most recently engineered package-management solution when I began with emacs, haven’t switched since and don’t think I’ll need to.

Given I’ve passed through SICP once, quickly grasping common lisp to build stuff and explore the traditional and industrial aspects of lisp (I know clojure exists but traditional…) was my next objective: with decent speed and only solving the somewhat involved exercises, it took me two weeks to complete this book. The exercises aren’t meant to be a challenge but to adapt to the environment and the topics introduced. The book does not explore concepts with depth (CLOS, macros, etc…) but that shouldn’t be the objective of an introduction anyway.

There’s a better way to do it - Find it. Thomas Alva Edison Managing one’s intellectual appetite in these times of information (and noise) excess is quite an ordeal. Given superior tooling and methods to plough through dense knowledge forests, coming up with the right set of tools for oneself is still a commendable task. In this post, I sketch out how one could go about making such choices practically, from why you should bother, to what tangible actions you can get started with.

If you wish to be a writer, write. Epictetus A Brief History I took up writing as a hobby in the sophomore year of my bachelors and it turned out to be the most definitive step towards bettering my way with words and expressing myself accurately. This is the fourth major iteration on my blogging system and I’ve noticed that I’m slowly tending towards minimalism and an overall clutter-free approach with each step, building up from my past stylistic mistakes and experiences.