Reasons to love Lisp
I just wrote a function, similar to memoization, that takes a function as input and allows it to successfully return a value only once in a given duration. A little syntactic sugar lets me write something like(make-no-more-than
:hourly
(email-if
(make-emailer "rnewman@…")
(list 'foo-above-80%
…)))I.e., I'll get an email at most once every 60 minutes above foo rising above 80%.
Now I don't need to be careful how often this check runs — I know my inbox won't be flooded.
The reason this is awesome is twofold: one, it's something like 10 lines of code; two, it's a completely natural solution to the problem, and I didn't have to think about it at all.
I dread to think about the mess of classes and XML configuration files one would need to do this flexibly in Java.
Posted at 2008-09-11 12:24:30 by Richard Newman • Link to Reasons to love Li…
