You have a Common Lisp program running, multiple threads listening for network connections, others processing data in the background. You were really careful making sure that there are no data access conflicts. Concurrency, check. You use Emacs and SLIME to connect to your server, inspect its state. Interactivity,...

Common Lisp pathnames, used to represent file paths, have the reputation of being hard to work with. This article aims to change this unfair reputation while highlighting the occasional quirks along the way. Filenames and file paths The distinction between filename and file paths is not always obvious. On POSIX...

Multiple Emacs modes recognize URIs so that you can follow them in a web browser, usually with a mouse left click. In modes that do not support it, one can still call browse-url-at-point interactively with the cursor positioned on a URI. I wanted to make link handling more convenient for some time; this is what I...

The canonical name of a Go module is its path. For third party modules, that means an URI. It is no secret that GitHub is currently the dominant code hosting platform, hence the fact that most Go modules are named github.com/<account>/<repository>. While I currently use GitHub for most of my repositories, I also...

So you have a server storing objects in a relational database, and an API, nowadays probably HTTP but it does not matter. Clients can fetch objects using the API. Obviously you do not want them loading too many objects at the same time, that would cause all kinds of performance issues. So you need a way to let...

Common Lisp programming is often presented as “interactive”. In most languages, modifications to your program are applied by recompiling it and restarting it. In contrast, Common Lisp lets you incrementally modify your program while it is running. While this approach is convenient, especially for exploratory...

Edit (2023-06-19) Updated to mention the +Bd option. I was recently in a conversation involving Erlang, and it made me feel like revisiting the subject. Last time I used Erlang for a commercial application, I remember a lot of frustration with the tooling, due in part to the small size of the ecosystem. Today I...

Introduction If you have already used functional languages, you are probably familiar with fold, a high order function used to iterate on a collection of values to combine them and return a result. You may be surprised that Common Lisp does not have a fold function, but provides REDUCE which works a bit differently....

I have been using Ngrok for almost two years in order to test webhooks during development. It works really well, true; but even the personal plan costs $96 a year if you want a fixed URI. I recently came across Frp, a reverse proxy packed with useful features. This is how I used it to replace Ngrok entirely. Of...

IELM is the Emacs Lisp REPL. It lets you evaluate any Elisp expression, prints the output and keeps track of previous commands. While it is a serious step-up from the humble eval-expression, it can be uncomfortable on several aspects. Let us improve it. Adding Eldoc hints Eldoc is a generic module used to display...

Workspaces are a feature introduced in March 2022 with Go 1.18. They did not really get a lot of publicity, and I have not had the chance to experiment with them until recently. However I am really glad I did because they improve a major aspect of my workflow: dealing with multiple modules. Go modules are not ideal...

A good line counting program has two features: it only counts non-empty lines to get a fair estimate of the size of a project, and it groups line counts by file type to help see immediately which languages are used. A long time ago I got frustrated with two well known line counters. Sloccount spits out multiple...