lisp

File Operations in Scheme

A little word game that I’ve been writing requires a list of acceptable words. For the game, acceptable words should be defined similarly to popular word games the player already knows like Scrabble® or Words with Friends. Luckily word lists for such games are readily available. For my little game, the list from Words with Friends seemed like the best choice. But it has about 175,000 English words. Way to many to use routinely in development.

Favorite Programming Books

Every programmer seems to have their own list of favorite programming books. The lists are very personal and seem to be influenced by the age of the programmer, their training, and their field of endeavor. My own list follows.

Getting Started with Lisp/Scheme/Clojure

Ya know, this point just keeps slapping me in the face. It seems that people don’t stop trying to use Lisp because they don’t like the language. A lot of people stop because they don’t like the programming environment. Looking around the Q&A sites there seem to be many more questions about setting up a programming environment for the Lisp family of languages than there are for the more mainstream languages like Java and C++.

Ideas for Simulated Evolution

Note: This is a re-post of an earlier entry recovered from a different blogging system. After entering and running the evolution.lisp example from Land of Lisp, I have some ideas for additional traits. Here are a few. Size, Carnivorous Animals. Add a feature to allow the animals to be of different sizes. Larger animals would expend energy faster. When two animals occupy, the same cell, the larger would try to eat the smaller, taking it’s energy.