Because I would rather be in bed than blogging, here is a very short#

Fri, 26 Mar 2004 05:46:34 +0000

Because I would rather be in bed than blogging, here is a very short entry

• now cycling to work. leytonstone->old street, this morning: 10km old street ->leytonstone, this evening: 20km. I missed a turning or several somewhere.

• I think I have a plan for new per-thread dynamic variable behaviour in sbcl (summary: it's going to look a bit like the Lispworks scheme but simpler), which I shall be expounding at the scheme-uk meeting on Wednesday week. Why there instead of uk-lispers? Because we meet in a pub and they meet in an office with projectors and whiteboards and suchlike: any insights we gain as a result are more likely to be remembered afterwards.

• I just wrote another object-relational layer in Perl (day job task). I'm still trying to figure out why there are some things I prefer working in Perl for, given that it's not the library support (pg.lisp would have done that bit nicely) or the syntax (give me sexps any day) or the editor support (which in perl consists of 80% correct indentation, and 90% correct angry-fruit-salad syntax highlighting). I think it's something to do with the way errors are presented: quite often by the time the system has worked out there's a problem I already realised that and mentally fixed it, and I would rather correct it and hit 'run that again' than have my train of thought interrupted by a debugger. Perhaps it'd be worth experimenting with a debugger interface that doesn't cut in until you ask it to (or maybe a repl with a "re-evaluate the last expression read" restart, or something similar), anathema though this may be to traditional lispers. Perhaps I'm too tired to think about this cogently.

After a moment's contemplation I realise that I am in bed while writing this, and should have expressed a preference for what I really want to be. Which is, right now, asleep. Good night, then