Recovered Technical Writing
My old blog at alan.dipert.org disappeared from the live web, but the
Internet Archive retained much of it. These are the pieces I still want
readers to encounter.
Discover Lisp in Your Web Browser with Javascript
This 2011 tutorial builds a small Lisp-to-JavaScript compiler in the browser. It connects parsing, compilation, evaluation, and the practical appeal of a Lisp representation without treating the language as a museum piece.
Read the recovered nine-page PDF or view the archived post. The PDF is the July 2011 original recovered from an October 2011 Wayback capture.
The S-expression Editor
This 2010 note sketches an editor where the underlying program structure is primary and text is one view of it. The idea became a thread through several later experiments in structural editing.
Structural editing series
These three posts follow the idea from editor mechanics into questions about selection, movement, and the representation of code:
- Structural Editing Redux, 2012
- Structural Editing Revisited, 2013
- Structural Editing Apocrypha, 2013
A Sigh of Datomic
This 2012 essay is about the relief of finding a database whose model begins with immutable facts and questions rather than mutable records. The direct post URL was not indexed, but the full essay survives in the recovered 2013 homepage capture.
Read the archived homepage capture
NCSA Mosaic on Github
I wrote this short account in 2010 after moving the old Mosaic source into a Git repository. It records why software preservation mattered to me before Software Heritage made the same repository part of its public examples.
My EngineYard Contest Odyssey
This 2009 technical story follows a programming contest entry from C code to EC2 images and a fleet of roughly 70 virtual machines. It is a useful picture of cloud experimentation before that workflow became routine.
Polyglot Folding
This 2009 tutorial compares folds in Ruby, Clojure, and Scala. Some library details have aged, but the central comparison between iteration and reducing a sequence remains useful.