Tags / lisp

Recently I’ve stumped upon a Reddit thread about defining a function that you can call a limited amount of times in Rust, with compile-time check, and I wondered if I can make the same thing in Clojure.

The last time I touched ClojureScript was almost two years ago. It was a really fun experience, and actually, it was a bit special to me personally. Prior to that post, I only learned lisp1 via books and mostly used it only for configuring Emacs, and while I’ve liked the idea of code as data and other lisp aspects, I never did anything more with the language.

Today’s topic will be about lazy sequences and how these are different from iterators. I’ve wanted to make an article on this topic for some time, but unfortunately, there was no good way to show the differences using a single language (that I know), because usually, languages stick to one of those things.

Not long ago I posted a small article on a Condition System in Clojure language. In that article, I was mostly trying to understand what a condition system is, and how it can enhance error handling in the code I write. Since that time, I’ve understood this system a lot better, by actually trying it in the Common Lisp language, the place where it came from, as far as I know.

A while ago I’ve watched this amazing talk: Condition Systems in an Exceptional Language by Chris Houser. And more recently I’ve found one interesting library called farolero, which provides a set of functions and macros that mimic Common Lisp’s condition system. So I was generally interested in the topic and decided to give it a shot and try both approaches.

Today we’ll take a look at an interesting Java library, called PF4J, which describes itself as a Plugin Framework for Java. The main purpose of this library is to provide a way of detecting, initializing, and using plugins to extend your Java application with new features without the need to modify the code.

Update: All the patches1​, 2​ has been merged into the main branch of Fennel language, so expect to see improved fennelview in next stable release! Some semantics have been altered, so I’ve updated the post a bit to reflect the changes.

Programming languages come in all shapes and sizes. There are pretty simple languages and really complex ones. But what unites most of these languages is the syntax. There are many languages so-called C-like, as they share many syntax ideas with C language, which includes consistent indentation, grouping, scoping, and infix notation.

Previously I decided to implement a rather basic raycasting engine in ClojureScript. It was a lot of fun, an interesting experience, and ClojureScript was awesome. I’ve implemented a small labyrinth game and thought about adding more features to the engine, such as camera shake, and wall height change.

Ray casting is quite an old technique, that was heavily used in the early days of game development in a lot of games to create an illusion of 3D space. The most known example, and perhaps the first widely successful game that used this technique, was Wolfenstein 3D, made by ID Software in 1992.