The Best of Bill - 2008
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
It's time for the last post of 2008. On December 31, 2004, I created
a "Best of Bill" posting for 2004 and it was quite popular (based on
the number of unique hits the posting got). So, I continued the
tradition each successive year after that. Since 2007 my year-end
posting has been cumulative, so it
includes the best postings from previous years as well. The
latest
cumulative summary is always available from the side bar (via
the "Best Posts" link).
You can always find my past weblog postings by either drilling down from the monthly
summaries (available when you click on the month name in the calendar
in the side bar or by clicking on the month name in the summary below) or by using the search utility (also in the side
bar). It's hard to know which posts others find most interesting, but
hit counts and email comments seem to be as good a measure as any. So,
a feature that I introduced to the summary (from 2006 onward) is that I've flagged (using
"[*]" as the "flag") the posts that either got the most "hits" on my blog each
month or ones that resulted in a significant amount of email to
me. However, when one of
my posts appears on Reddit or Digg, that always drives up the page
count even though the post may not be what I would have considered one
of my "better" posts. So, I use some "subjective" assessment as well
as raw numbers in my rankings. For a number of months, it was too close to call, so I flagged
multiple high-ranking posts for those months.
I have deliberately tried to leave out of the summary any postings that are personal,
or product/meeting announcements, or non-Lisp related (although my definition
of "lisp-related" might be fairly "broad" in some cases ;-) ).
My five "most popular" posts of the past year
were:
- What Emacs is to editors, Stumpwm is to window managers
- Clojure could be to Concurrency-Oriented Programming what Java was to OOP
- Hacking the OLPC XO Laptop - Part 1: Initial Setup
- Understanding SLIME (Using Emacs and Lisp Cooperatively)
- My Lisp-centric "Good Easy"
2008:
-
January:
- Happy New Year and Happy 50th Birthday to Lisp!
- Installing w3m for Emacs Internet browsing on Mac OS X Leopard
- Lisp on the OLPC XO Laptop
- clbuild - (Lisp with Batteries Included - Part 2)
- Git for SBCL Hackers
- Hacking the OLPC XO Laptop - Part 1: Initial Setup [*]
- Hacking the OLPC XO Laptop - Part 2: Xfce
- February:
- March:
- April:
- May:
- June:
- July:
-
August:
- Little Brother [*]
- September:
-
October:
- Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 1
- Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 2 - Setup
- Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 3 - Some Language Features [*]
- Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 4: Not Your Daddy's Namespaces
- Exploring Clojure (Lisp on the JVM) - Part 5: Clojure Documentation using FreeMind
- November:
- December:
2007:
2006:
-
January:
- Concurrent/Parallel Programming - The Next Generation (Follow-ups were posted here, here, and here)
- Surviving Emacs (Follow-ups were posted here, here, here, here) [*]
- Lisp is for Entrepreneurs (Follow-up posted here) [*]
- Update on Termite (A Lisp for Concurrent/Parallel Programming)
- February:
- March:
- April:
-
May:
- CL-MUPROC - Erlang-style Concurrent Programming in CL (Follow-up posted here) [*]
- Firefox for Emacs users (Follow-up posted here) [*]
- June:
- July:
- August:
- September:
- October:
- November:
- December:
2005:
- January:
- February:
- March:
-
April:
- Customizing Emacs for Mac OS X (A follow-up was posted here)
- Zen and the Art of Lisp Programming
- May:
- June:
- July:
-
August:
- Long Form of define-method-combination in CLOS
- All Your Closures Are Belong To Us
- Hints to Macro Writers
- Some Things Need to be Easy, and Not Just Possible, to Take Advantage of Them
- OpenMCL Presentation
- Summmary of lispvan August 2005 meeting - Seaside movie
- Resistance is Futile - LispWorks Editor Customizations
- September:
-
October:
- MIT Open Sources the LispM Code
- LispM Links
- Managing CL Libraries (Follow-up posted here)
- Now, you too can write a best-selling Lisp book!
- How are Lisps implemented?
- ASDF Dependency Graphs
- Summmary of lispvan October 2005 meeting - Extreme CL Presentation
- Lisp is the red pill
- Lisp Logos (A follow-up was posted here)
- Maxima, SBCL, Emacs, Imaxima, oh my!
- November:
-
December:
- Learning Lisp from Franz
- Lisp Books
- LispWorks HTTP Client/Server Movie
- Using a Lisp Web Server Behind Apache
- (Re)writing Reddit in Lisp Movie
- Summmary of lispvan December 2005 meeting: Lisp on Lines movie
- Remote Lisp Development with SLIME/Emacs
- Using Circular Structures in CL
- Creating Stand-Alone EXE's With CLISP
2004:
- January:
- February:
- March:
- April:
- May:
-
June:
- Using MySql with Allegro CL (Follow-ups on CLSQL were posted here and here)
- Symbolics LispM's - What might have been
- CL and Tail-Call Elimination
- CL proven to be the best programming language ;-)
- Gregory Chaitin, Math, Philosophy and Lisp
- Genetic Programming in Common Lisp
- SOAP Web Services in CL
- CL to Java (Follow-ups were posted here, here, and here)
- Debugging Approaches in CL (A follow-up was posted here)
- CL Implementation Benchmarks on Win2000
- July:
- August:
-
September:
- AllegroCache - Object-Prevalence++
- Allegro Prolog - A Prolog in Lisp (A follow-up was posted here)
- Lisp .Net (Follow-ups were posted here and here)
- Another CL to Java option - Lisplets (A follow-up was posted here)
-
October:
- Loop extensibility
- Elephant Object Database now works on Win32
- Araneida web server now works on Win32
- CL HTML template languages
- CL Web Server Options
- Lisppaste - an interesting program
- CL Symbols (A follow-up was posted here)
- Introduction to CL development environments
- Surviving Emacs (A follow-up was posted here)
- Lisp Success Stories
- Trivial Socket programming in CL
- November:
- December:
2003:
- August:
- September:
- October:
-
November:
- Using Emacs as a Lisp IDE now on CL Cookbook site
- I'm Learning Scheme Again
- R5RS in Info format in Emacs
- Where is macroexpand in Scheme?
- CPS transformer that provides a restricted call/cc for Common Lisp
- Macroexpand in PLT Scheme (A follow-up was posted here)
- Article about Seaside - a continuation-based Web Framework in Smalltalk
- Continuation-based Web Framework for CL
- December:

