Category Archives: Lisp

A Personal Lisp Crisis

By John Croisant | Published: 2012-05-29

There is a half-jocular saying among atheists, that the surest way for a Christian to lose their faith is to read the Bible, cover to cover. The idea is that if you really scrutinize it, and don’t gloss over the strange, antiquated, or inconsistent parts, it stops seeming so profound and special. I don’t know [...]

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A Rubyist’s Impressions of Common Lisp

By John Croisant | Published: 2012-04-04

It has been nearly 6 months since I dove into Common Lisp. I have been studying and/or using Common Lisp almost every day, working on Ambienome and related code. So, I wanted to take some time to document my observations, feelings, and impressions of Common Lisp at this time. Be advised that this is a [...]

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Physics Engine and Object Selection

By John Croisant | Published: 2012-02-27

This is the second part of my post about what I’ve been working on lately. In the first part, I talked about data structures and serialization. In this post, I talk about the physics engine and object selection via mouse picking. For Ambienome’s physics engine, I’m using SquirL, a Common Lisp port of the popular [...]

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Data Structures and Serialization

By John Croisant | Published: 2012-02-24

Lately, I’ve been tackling several separate, but interconnected, systems in Ambienome: data structures, serialization, object selection, and the physics engine. These are complex topics, so I’ve written this in two parts. In this first part, I talk about data structures and serialization, and in the second part I talk about the physics engine and object [...]

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Mini-project: proto-slots

By John Croisant | Published: 2012-01-05

I’ve just released proto-slots, a mini-project I created as part of Ambienome. From the README: proto-slots provides a macro for defining prototypal accessor methods so that CLOS instances will support protoypal inheritance. Prototypal inheritance means that an instance’s slots can inherit values from another instance, known in these docs as the “base object” (but more [...]

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Ambienome – Technology

By John Croisant | Published: 2011-11-13

In my previous post, I described the concept and roadmap for my new project, Ambienome. In this post, I’ll be describing the technology (programming language and libraries) I’m using, and why I chose them. Even though I have seven years of experience with Ruby, and my own game library, Rubygame, already available and ready to [...]

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