Bit-rot -- in more ways than one

It's been an awful long time -- far too long -- since I wrote anything about Common Lisp in this weblog. One of the reasons is that, worryingly, I've not actually written much Common Lisp code.

In the past few days I've been upgrading the Debian system on my main "Lisp hacking" box and have started to play again. Right away I ran into a problem. About a year ago, by way of trying to learn something about McCLIM, I wrote a little front-end for my dictd client code (org-davep-dict) called org-davep-cldict. Most of it was cobbled together by reading and trying to learn from some of the McCLIM examples. Although it's not really that amazing an application it was a useful learning experience and seemed to be a good test of the new environment I was using (it was also a good way of getting to know SLIME).

So, fast-forward to a few days ago and a full upgrade of my Debian box. Lots of Common Lisp stuff gets upgraded along the way. After the odd tweak here and there I finally try and load up cldict and get this:


CL-USER[7]> (org.davep.cldict:cldict)


#<clim-clx::clx-medium {5A683EBD}> fell through etypecase expression.
Wanted one of (stream (member t) string null).
[Condition of type conditions::case-failure]

Restarts:
0: [abort] Return to application command loop
1: Return to Top-Level.

Debug (type H for help)

(format #<clim-clx::clx-medium {5A683EBD}> "~&~%dict~A: " "")
Source:
; File: target:code/format.lisp
(etypecase destination
(null (with-output-to-string # #))
(string (with-output-to-string # #))
((member t) (%format *standard-output* control-string format-arguments) nil)
...)
0]


I guess something's changed in McCLIM since I last did some hacking with it -- either that or I wasn't really paying attention at the time and made an assumption or two that I shouldn't have and now I'm suffering for it. Oh well, at least now I've got a reason to do some Common Lisp stuff again -- I've got some broken code to fix. That should help reverse the bit-rot that's been setting into my Common Lisp knowledge.

Confusion, time travel, something else?

I notice from various blogs that Practical Common Lisp is close to being released. Because of this I popped over to Amazon UK with a view to seeing if it'll be available via them and how much it'll cost. Interestingly, as of the time of writing, it suggests that it is available but "hard-to-find". It seems to suggest that the book was released September 30, 2004.

Compare and contrast with Amazon.com where it tells use that the book "has not yet been released".

Ok, I'm confused, what am I missing?

org-davep-nntp v2.0 released

I've re-worked and re-packaged nntp.lisp (some lisp code I wrote a couple of years ago) as an asdf package called org-davep-nntp. You can download it with asdf-install from its Cliki page.

Not wanting to feel left out...

It seems that every other Lisp hacker in the world is now writing blogs relating to Lisp use and, not wanting to feel left out, I decided it was time I caved in and had a go too.

So, here's another blog that'll be mostly about Lisp, created and updated with a view to getting a mention on Cliki's Weblog page and perhaps listed over on Planet Lisp.