New twinql
twinql 0.3.1 has been released. The query execution functionality has been split out into several libraries:
as well as existing dependencies on:
… and, of course,
Wilbur 2.
twinql itself compiles without so much as a style warning on SBCL 0.9.8 on Mac OS 10.4.4. It passes its minimal (17 tests) test suite, and works well in the projects for which I employ it. Not bad for about 8k
LOLC! If you want to play around with RDF and the Semantic Web using Lisp, you could do worse than to download
SBCL,
Wilbur 2, and
my RDF libraries as a bundle. (You'll also need
CL-PPCRE and genhash, available using
asdf-install.)
Install SBCL, extract Wilbur and the libraries somewhere, symlink all of the
.asd files you can find into your ASDF search path, and
(asdf:oos 'asdf:load-op 'twinql). I'm tempted to throw together a core file to make this easier, actually.
If you're au fait with
asdf-install, you can point it at
twinql, and everything should just work:
(require 'asdf-install)
(asdf-install:install 'twinql)
My documentation strings are quite thorough (
e.g., (describe 'run-sparql)), but the docs themselves aren't quite up to date. Sorry!
Posted at 2006-03-04 23:52:20 by Richard • Link to New twinql
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Programming languages
I'm working my way through some of
Steve Yegge's blog rants, and I found these paragraphs (in a
rant about Perl) to be quite entertaining.
Desperate or not, those people aren't going to work for me. I demand excellence from my co-workers. The disease, nay, the virus of programming-language religion has a simple cure: you just write a compiler. Or an interpreter. One for any language other than the one you know best. It's as easy as that. After you write a compiler (which, to be sure, is a nontrivial task, but if there's some valid program out there that you couldn't ever write, then you're not justified in calling yourself a programmer), the disease simply vanishes. In fact, for weeks afterwards, you can't look at your code without seeing right through it, with exactly the same sensation you get when you stare long enough at a random-dot stereogram: you see your code unfold into a beautiful parse tree, with scopes winding like vines through its branches, the leaves flowering into assembly language or bytecode.
When you write a compiler, you lose your innocence. It's fun to be a shaman, knowing that typing the right conjuration will invoke the gods of the machine and produce what you hope is the right computation. Writing a compiler slays the deities, after which you can no longer work true magic. But what you lose in excitement, you gain in power: power over languages and over language-related tools. You'll be able to master new languages rapidly and fearlessly. You may lose your blind faith, but you gain insight into the hauntingly beautiful machinery of your programs. For many, it deepens their real faith. Regardless, it lets them sit at the table with their peers as equals.
Posted at 2006-03-04 16:58:23 by Richard • Link to Programming langua…
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