association-list

One of the thing that makes CL a pain in the ass sometimes is that there are a lot of strangely named functions specialized for different types of objects. The language has a trillion keywords and a lot of them don’t really help the language learner get comfortable with the language. As an example, iteration:

In the language standard there are a couple of different iteration constructs, do, dolist, docount, and loop. Strangely, there is no doarray. It’s easy enough to write one:

(defmacro do-svect ((counter array) &rest body)
  (let ((ctr (gensym)))
    `(dotimes (,ctr (fill-pointer ,array)) 
       (let ((,counter (aref ,array ,ctr)))
     ,@body))))

That’s all well and good, but it’s a pain to have to write a macro for each and every sequence type of thing that you have to deal with, and while I understand why it isn’t there, I don’t understand why there isn’t some general foreach type of function. It would be easy enough to write, just a macro that detects the type of the sequence type the function was called on that writes out the appropriate thing. There are a number of situations where this would help a lot, to the beginner. Just layer them as macros over the normal syntax and keywords, which, of course, would all still be there if you needed to do something more complicated.

Syntax, I think, makes things easier to remember, because (and I’m theorizing here) it calls in some other part of the brain than the part that we use to remember vocabulary, which is what we’re being asked to do with Lisp. I’ve never in my life written a line of Smalltalk, but I can remember that their lambda syntax is something like [ x y | x * y ]. I know very little Erlang, but I know that their binary pattern matching syntax is << x/integer, y/float >> = val. I’ve been reading about lisp for years and staring at it for ten of the last sixteen hours and I’ll be damned if I can remember how to pass multiple values back from a function.

Perhaps Arc will fix all of this, but I think that it would be of no little value to the Lisp community, and to those who want to learn lisp, if people started working on a package that everyone agreed to include and use with their distributions (hah!) that made some things a little easier. It could be something like the modern package that comes with ACL. Hell, everyone could make their own and then we could give them six months, then put them all in a ring and make them fight and then make something more or less agreeable to everyone with the parts that are left over.

Lisp is famed for it’s ability to quickly generate Domain Specific Languages, so perhaps it’s time that we bent that ability towards a different kind of domain, that of learning the language itself. It might also point to the kinds of things that would be interesting to put into the next version of the spec, in the far-off, misty future when that fabled document is actually generated.

Quiet lately. Rather busy at work, plus trips home and being busy with other writing projects.

In other news, a few words on books that I’ve finished recently.

Mistborn, by Brandon Sanderson.

Though Elantris was a promising debut, this novel doesn’t step it up as much as one might wish. Although it’s pretty nice in that it is another stand-alone book, for which I think Mr. Sanderson should be applauded, the writing hasn’t grown quite as much as one might wish, and there is also second degree abuse of the word ‘maladroit’. It also doesn’t properly address my complaints about the exceptionalism inherent in modern fantasy. My big gripe with the book is that, although it has its heart in the right place, with the people and all, it doesn’t really interact with them very much. Even the main character, supposedly drawn from the lowest of the low, seems exceptionally clever and not beaten down as the skaa, the proles of this particular word are called, would seem to be, and they’re more or less disposable and interchangeable throughout the course of the narrative. There is a touch of the revolutionary vanguard party ideology going on here, that’s something that I’ve never been able to identify with, although your mileage may vary, depending on your political stripe and tolerance for that sort of thing. However, Sanderson continues to produce books that stand head and shoulders above standard extruded fantasy product and take on the standard tropes of the genre with no small amount of rigor and inventiveness.

Trial of Flowers by Jay Lake.

I got ahold of a galley of this one, which is coming out soonish. It starts out in the vein of novels like The Etched City (which I loved) and Veniss Underground (which I thought was interesting, but flawed), but lacks the ultimate sense of hopelessness that many of the novels of that ilk are afflicted by, and I think is made better thereby. It’s refreshing to see a blend of the world-weary and disaffected characters most traditional to the ‘new weird’ movement fused with some of the grand, sweeping structural elements of traditional fantasy without being overconsious of the effect, and I think that this is where the great strength of this novel lies. Deeper but more distant than work by Mieville, who I would hold up as the modern exemplar, I think that a lot of people will like this one, and also that it heralds big things for Mr. Lake.

The Demon and The City, by Liz Williams.

I really shouldn’t even have to say anything here. The Chen novels just get more interesting in this iteration, and Williams just gets better and better. All told, I have to admit that I slightly prefer her ‘pure’ science fiction stuff, but these novels are a lot of fun, and I think that they’re much more accessible to a general audience.

Night Watch by Sergei Lukyanenko.

I thought that the film was decent, but I liked the book(s) quite a bit better. The movies changed the story around to create resonances that I don’t think really needed to be created, and I think that the lost a lot without the conflicted voice of the narrator. The ending feels a little like a cheat, but the setting is interesting, and I hope that this one does well enough to get more Russian contemporary fiction and genre stuff coming out in English.

The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman.

Um. Wow. I just finished this and I will admit to being more than a little overwhelmed. Ryman is, in my opinion, one of the top three prose stylists working in the genre at the moment. My inner science geek is appalled, at times, with the treatment of some of the science, but that’s about the only criticism that I can level at this particular work. The world depicted is simultaneously intricately surreal and utterly quotidian, and I would describe it, at the risk of sounding Cluteian, as a fictive world with the heft of the Real. There are some disturbing elements and some absolutely harrowing sequences. The book really sucks you in to the point where it’s painful to read some of it, but you cannot stop. I haven’t read all of Ryman’s novels, but with every one I am more and more impressed.

Sun of Suns by Karl Schroeder.

Two words, people: Air Pirates. This book, which is a smart little novel in the vein of the old pulp adventures updated for contemporary sensibilities, much like Paragaea, by Chris Roberson. It also has one of the cooler science-fictional conceits that I’ve come across recently: The entire novel takes place in a world sized ball of air lit by giant fusion radiators that the people call the suns. The entire thing is convincingly well thought out, but Schroeder never lets the world building get in the way of the action or the driving plot. I quite like Karl Schroeder, and although this is one of his lighter books, I recommend it highly. Fun fun fun, and have the inkling that this particular series is really going to go places.

Blindsight by Peter Watts.

As I’ve said before, this one is a book that you need to read to even pretend that you know where science fiction is in this day and age. There’s likely already enough breathless prose out there describing it, so I won’t add much but to say that it’s a fascinating example of how to make deeply, deeply flawed characters engaging and compelling. Hell, in this one, the characters are barely human (and not, in some cases) but you can’t really put it down. It is not a book without flaws, but it works in the “if you’re not failing you aren’t trying hard enough” kind of sense. Watts might not have reached his goals here, but with the aim of the novel being hitting the ball somewhere into the next state, I think that everyone could be content with just a grand slam home run.

The Machine’s Child by Kage Baker.

I have to admit that this book annoyed me somewhat, as the Company sequence is still not over, and this book does little but set up the pieces for the grand finale. It seems to be that it’s going to end with an incredible bang (supposedly in the next and last book), but we’re still not there yet, so there isn’t a lot to say.

Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr.

This book makes me angry because I’d barely heard of Tiptree before I picked it up. I have tons and tons of old year’s bests and collections from the period in which she was writing, but I don’t think that I’d read a single story from this collection before, and that’s a crying shame. Many of the stories in here are totally amazing and deeply depressing. You will not find anything nice said about human nature, but you will find some really excellent prose, and the titles! Wow. You owe it to yourself to find a copy of this and read it. It is one of the building blocks upon which modern science fiction is built (indeed, William Gibson owes Tiptree a particularly large debt, only subtly acknowledged, as far as I know), and it’s terrible that her work is more or less unknown to the modern reader (at least of my age group). Hopefully the new biography will belatedly bring her more readers.

Scar Night by Alan Campbell.

There was a lot of pre-release buzz for this one, but it doesn’t really live up to it, in my opinion. It’s a first novel, plain and simple, and doesn’t nearly have the depth or density or reach of China Mieville’s similar and, honestly, much better, work. Still, it isn’t terrible and it doesn’t rule out Campbell’s work becoming of more interest in the future, although if I were Campbell, I would ignore the fact that the book claims to be book one of a series and write about somewhere else for a while.

Memory by Linda Nagata.

I’m not all that familiar with Nagata’s books. This one isn’t terrible, but it’s light reading. There’s some interesting stuff here, but for all that the ending costs a lot, you don’t really know all that much more when it ends than when it begins (I have a feeling that it was meant to be book one of a series that didn’t get written), and I don’t think that the losses, at least at the end, are deeply felt or affect the characters very much. The world where the novel takes place is pretty interesting, and I feel like it would be pretty interesting to learn about what’s really going on there, but you don’t get there in this book.

End of the World Blues by John Courtenay Grimwood.

In this one, Grimwood continues being uneven. Stamping Butterflies was great, 9tail Fox interesting but less great, and this one falls into the latter category. You’re never quite sure what’s really going on or what the significance of the far future story thread is, and it never gets explained, or at least explained well enough to make me care. The best thing about this novel is the characterization of the near-future thread’s protagonist, a broken, conflicted loser who’s made some really nasty mistakes in the past. For all that he fails to become completely real at times, his story is interesting and carries you through the book well enough. I just feel that Grimwood romanticizes the outsider/pseudo-psychopathic male a bit too much. He has the chops to tell us a really interesting story, and he’s getting there. I’m betting that in a book or two he’s going to make a breakthrough and write something that’s huge and possibly quite important. I’m really looking forward to reading it, when it finally arrives.

So reading Karl Schroeder’s blog (one of them, at least), pointed me to Mixing Memory, which got me thinking about cog sci stuff, which in train with reading about Scott Adams getting his voice back got me thinking about sense perception and pheromones. Presuming that human have pheromones, we can’t consciously detect that we’re ‘smelling’ them. I use the scare quotes because although the purported pheromone receptors are in the nose, they are not the same receptors with which humans actually process smells that we can sense. So presumably we sense these things, but have no conscious knowledge of smelling them. It is mooted that they might affect behavior, but that’s not really what I’m interested in. So, assuming that these chemicals arouse some response in the brain that’s unconsciously processed, it seems to me that one could then, in an experimental context, associate these chemicals with other chemicals or stimuli that humans can consciously sense. Presumably, this would then create some sort of conditioned association with the other stimulus. Then, once the association had been conditioned, the observable stimulus could be removed, and the effects of the ‘unpercieveable’ stimulus could be measured (e.g. the subject could press a button when they thought that they ‘smelled’ the pheromone.). Obviously I don’t have the knowledge or experience to design a proper experimental protocol, and certainly could not constructively interpret the results, but I think that it presents a unique sort of window into human sense perception. Essentially, everything else that we have receptors for, we can perceive, although we might not do so all of the time. Pheromones seem to be unique in that we can sense them, but not perceive the sensation. If it could be associated with something that we could sense… I have no idea what it would mean, but it sounds like something interesting to try.

So, the other day I was reading programming blogs, which seems to be the thing do do when you don’t actually want to work, and I ran into Erlang’s facility for binary pattern matching. Essentially it’s a rather nice syntax for taking a wodge (that’s a technical term) of binary data and decomposing it into variables. So:

<< foo:8, monkey/integer, bazzle:16, arrr:4/string, rest/binary >> = packet

will get you ubyte called foo with the first 8 bits of packet, an unsigned integer called monkey from the 9th through 40th bits, a ushort called bazzle, a 4 byte string called arrr (you could specify further what type of string, I think, if you needed something else), and a binary glob called rest with the rest of packet. I thought that this was pretty neat, and was thinking that making a nice, general facility for this in Lisp would make an interesting project, at least for me, because even though I know a fair amount about Lisp, I haven’t really used it that much. In any case, I was reading up about how someone might go about doing something like this when I ran into something in Practical Common Lisp that was more or less exactly what I was thinking of, expressed in a macro that really isn’t that long. it’s called define-binary-class and generates the class and a constructor that will read in binary data in a similar manner to the above. Plus, with some trivial modifications, I’m sure that you could alter it to make either structures or classes and to nest definitions, which is something that the static syntax of Erlang cannot do.

This, to me, is the primary virtue of Lisp, but it’s sometimes frustrating that most things are so trivial in the language that there’s nothing to do as an intro but leap into application code. This, perhaps, is one of the things that keeps people from getting into the language. You can do anything, but it’s either trivial or hard (or at least time consuming). Also, you’re forever doing things and then realizing that the massive standard library already has something that does exactly that. And then there’s the constant impetus to refactor the code into something cleaner, which the macro facilities of the language makes easy, fun and powerful, so the temptation to cat-hoover away all of your programming time cleaning up the code is pretty strong. That all of this is exacerbated by my lack of ability to think of enthralling software projects to work on is, I’m sure, incidental.

I don’t have time at the moment to write about it more fully, but you should likely read Peter Watts’ Blindsight right away.