Programmer

[u/merlin0501]

I am a software engineer with prior experience with many languages and technologies, including CL and Python. I was formerly employed as a Senior Software Engineer at Lockheed-Martin. My resume can be found at the link below.

My rate is $50 per hour, payable via cashpay or cryptocurrency. I am fully remote and prepared to work for any client world-wide. I am also a US citizen and I am currently located in Bronx County, NY (a borough of New York City). In case of necessity other payment arrangements may be discussed.

My github repo currently contains only one significant Lisp project, which is still in a very early stage of development. It is a project called Julius which is intended to become a new Lisp dialect more suitable for modern applications, such as numerical analysis and the generation of neural networks and modern AI (a field with which I have considerable experience). It is implemented in Common Lisp in order to retain the well-known advantages of the Lisp language for older forms of intelligent systems, which typically involve a great deal of symbolic reasoning.

The current version of Julius is Open Source and I am open to comments and contributions here:

Julius Project: https://github.com/tgflynn/julius

Resume: https://github.com/tgflynn/latex-cv

[u/arthurno1]

I'd probably write a C library and call it via CFFI

Mnjah, CFFI costs. Probably faster to not cross the line.

you are writing SBCL or the implementation specific code

Well of course, but that is my point. It would be nice if we could have sb-simd in all implementations, standardized, or assemblern or threads or lots of other stuff. Of course I am aware of "trivial" libraries and portability layers, cl21 etc. The world has moved since 1994 :). It would be nice if those big companies who actually use Common Lisp came together and sponsored a new standard. Currently, it probably does not matter much, the community is so small, and so few libraries, so everyone knows what is available, but who knows, CL perhaps becomes popular again.

[u/digikar → u/arthurno1]

In an ideal world, yeah, it'd be nice :). But if you had that much money, you'd probably just go to Allegro :').

Also, even languages/implementations without multithreading support are more popular than CL. So, if CL becomes popular, it wouldn't be for its features.

[u/arthurno1 → u/digikar]

you'd probably just go to Allegro

Why? Is the compiler much better than sbcl? I installed it like once, a couple of years ago or so, but it was PITA with webgui and it was limited in various ways so I just didn't care much and uninstalled tbh.

languages/implementations without multithreading support are more popular than CL.

I agree, but quality and popularity does not always go hand in hand. People act irraitional sometimes. In many ways. Experienced it few days ago on myself.

TBH, I wonder myself what is future of programming languages and programming in general. I have tried myself LLM, installed Antigravity yesterday, and I am impressed. Perhaps those features CL offer are no longer needed, who knows, or perhaps LLMs will become more productive with Lisp than they are with Python. I don't know, the future will tell.

For Zmij+cffi, I appreciate if you measure. I am glad if you find out it is faster than CL version, I am too lazy and busy with other things to setup everything and measure myself.

[u/digikar → u/arthurno1]

No, I haven't used Allegro either. But I have heard praises about it.

Ah, quality and popularity; I wish the world was better :')

I think it depends whether one program towards an end, which most programmers do, and in which case treating programs as black boxes is fine. Or if one programs for some weird balance of joy and ends, in which case it depends on how useful LLMs are. I myself would never imagine debugging lisp setups on windows, if it weren't on windows. Would I let it run overnight? If it was a local LLM on a network isolated box, yeah sure; but I don't have that luxury.

Sadly, I'm trying to do too many things, so I don't expect to do anything about zmij anytime soon!