ruricolist

I do have a source, and I finally tracked it down:

https://nature.berkeley.edu/ucce50/ag-labor/7research/7calag...

The problem with piece work (in an agricultural context, at least) is that is reveals a wide discrepancy in productivity between workers. The most productive workers are usually about 8x as productive as the average. Employers balk at the prospect of paying that much extra, so they create various kinds of mixed schemes that cap the worker's pay regardless of how much actual work they do. So the practical result of piece work is simply to punish below-average workers, without actually doing anything to incentivize above-average work.

Could you implement arbitrary return with cl-block and cl-return-from?

I don't think the author was talking about the general case of continuations -- he was talking about the general case of unwind-protect in the presence of continuations -- what Schemers nowadays call dynamic-wind.

Doesn't Perl 6 have macros? If you have macros, you can do it both elegantly and efficiently by expanding Horner's rule at compile time. You can still use reduce; just have it return the form unevaluated.

In fact, because the coefficients are constant at compile time, you could precondition the polynomial and do even better than Horner's rule, with only three multiplications.

Most (maybe all) of these papers are available in HTML at the Jsoftware site:

http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/

Alternatively, you could just use Shen, which actually uses Prolog to implement its type system.

Gasbichler's implementation of hygiene (in "Fully parameterized, first-class modules with hygienic macros") actually uses De Bruijn indexes.

You could use an if variant with keywords, like if* (http://franz.com/~jkf/ifstar.txt):

(if* (== foo 3) then (foo 4) (return))

Medieval Arabic scribes would turn the paper on its side and write from top to bottom to avoid exactly this problem. It's why Arabic numerals are sideways compared to European "Arabic" numerals.

Stephen Wolfram's post about Ada Lovelace:

http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2015/12/untangling-the-tale-o...

Is actually surprisingly substantive, and addresses (among other things) the correspondence between Lovelace and Babbage while she was working on the Appendix.

That's fascinating. You've essentially kept the social infrastructure of Quicklisp (quicklisp-projects, repos exposed to Quicklisp) but replaced the technical infrastructure.

Out of curiosity, what do you use instead of Quicklisp?

Note that the Common Lisp example could be abbreviated to:

(- 9999999999999999.0l0 9999999999999998.0l0)

However, this will only work (either way) in Lisps where long floats are arbitrary precision, like CLISP. In most Lisps (e.g. SBCL, CCL), long floats are just double floats.

Swift wasn't unsocial; he was a politician.

This article manages to entirely omit his political career, which, as feats of omission go, is pretty impressive.

For those not familiar with 18th century literature, a little context might be in order.

The Spectator that Franklin made a model of is no relation of the modern magazine. This Spectator was an "essay series", a peculiarly 18th century genre, something like an editorial column without a magazine -- or a blog, for that matter.

At the time, the Spectator essays were considered the high-water mark of good style and clear expression in English.

You can read them for yourself on Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/12030

It's more probable that the original was a goat:

"Upon killing a kid, a farmer simply takes its milk-filled stomach, ties it off in a tight knot or sews it shut, perhaps covers it in mesh to keep the flies off, then hangs it from the ceiling of a cool, dark room. He then waits for a few months until the natural rennet within curdles and hardens the milk into a thick, creamy cheese..."

http://roadsandkingdoms.com/2015/the-secret-life-of-cheese/

I'm reminded of Urquhart's "Trissotetras":

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A95751.0001.001?rgn=main;vi...

I think the nastiest thing to parse in RSS feeds these days is code highlighting. To a surprising degree, people who should know better use blogging software that chops up code into tables, divs, and spans, and styles them with CSS that is not included in the feed. You either have to either reconstruct the underlying plain-text code as best you can, or try to recognize and support a zoo of different highlighting libraries.

I've gotten the impression in the past that ISLISP was largely based on pre-existing work by Queinnec, but I don't have any proof.

It's not all culture, but US culture, that is designed for people under 40. (Actually, for people under 30, but it usually takes until 40 to notice it.)

The stuff about Cortot is bizarre -- he belonged to a completely different era, when technical perfection was simply not the goal.

You might want to look at Zile:

https://www.gnu.org/software/zile/

A more direct comparison for Emacs would be `adjust-parens`:

https://elpa.gnu.org/packages/adjust-parens.html

If you can't say "mercurial Spaniard" to your friends, get new friends.

On the subject of SNOBOL descendants still in use, there is also Snowball, designed and used exclusively for writing stemming algorithms:

http://snowball.tartarus.org/

Does anyone read actually read code left-to-right, line-by-line?

I for one start with the shape of the code -- the pattern of color (from syntax highlighting) and negative space (from indentation) -- and only then focus on the different parts.

And Lisp is particularly helpful this way, because instead of paragraph-like blocks of code where you have to reconstruct the state of the code in your head by mentally modeling side effects, you can see the general outlines of what's happening from the levels of indentation.

I want to defend Lisp, of course, but I'm also genuinely curious about different ways people read code.

This is a good example of the technical restrictions that make lyrics a (proper) subset of poetry: note in particular the abundance of long vowels, which make it not just readable but singable.

You aren't by any chance Yvor Winters?

The rest of the story: http://blog.bumblebeelabs.com/the-parable-of-the-fisherman/