Berlin Brown and Software Development

Overview This is a follow-up to my earlier entry on Lisp in Java; the entry described implementing a Lisp interpreter in Java. This blog posts covers implementing a similar approach using Erlang. In essence, a port of the JSceme interpreter to Erlang. So you can see compare and contrast the differences in Erlang and Java code. Like I always do, I am going to first introduce Erlang with simple examples and then go over the simple Lisp implementation. All of the source is provided at the end of the entry. What is Erlang? Erlang is a general purpose programming language that is great for writing concurrent applications and components. That is accomplished by some of the slimmed-down language features including immutable code, simple message passing primitives, and lightweight processes. It was created by Ericsson in 1987 and later open sourced in 1998. Erlang language syntax is based on Prolog. Why Erlang? I don't know why the software community can't accept another progr...

"Google recently released news that Google's index contains one trillion URLs. This is great news that the Internet has grown to such enormous size but not that great for users that want to traverse all of that information. Google and other search engines provide applications for users to "search" the web and get to information they are interested based on keywords and other queries. Social networking sites turns that paradigm around a bit. Applications like Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit and Botlist provide user portal sites for users to post their favorite links. As opposed to users querying and searching for interesting links. Users submit their links to sites like Reddit and tag them with interesting titles and keywords. Hopefully the user submitted links fall inline with content that you are also interested in. Botlist attempted to go a step further and focus on the bot/agent generated links. News aggregation and user submitted links. Botlist contains an open source ...

Overview I have never had much affinity for writing (in natural language); I have grown up and enjoy programming and that is what I continue to do 20 years later. But I really wanted to get this blog entry out and it helped me rethink and reframe how I look at a particular piece of code. So I am going to move in all different directions starting with one of the most elementary data structures in Computer Science, the linked list. Instead of thinking of Lisp code (for now anyway) as a "listing" of elements. Think of Lisp code as a linked list of elements. How do you implement a linked list in C (or Java or Fortran)? How would you print all of the elements of the linked list? How would you sum all of the elements? After thinking about the last numeric operation? Can you think of possible ways to implement various List operations, Lisp operations like 'map' ? The Linked List Why are linked lists important to Lisp? "The name Lisp derives from "List Pro...