Books of Note

Practical Common
LispThe best intro to start your journey. Excellent coverage of CLOS.

ANSI Common
LispAnother great starting point with a different focus.

Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence
ProgrammingA superb set of Lisp examples. Not just for the AI crowd.

Monday, November 21, 2005

Grid programming in Lisp 

I love it when somebody thinks the way that I do. For quite some time, I have thought that it would be cool to create a distributed compute architecture based on Lisp. The ability to send a sexpr from one machine to another for evaluation is a very simple way to make a distributed architecture. Well, Brendan Kosowski has been thinking similar thoughts and sent me a link to his Simple Grid Protocol library. I haven't had a chance to play with it much myself, but it looks really neat.

Brendan says:

The Simple Grid Protocol is designed to allow users on a TCP/IP network or the Internet to run programs on their computer which utilize the unused CPU resources of other computers on a network or the Internet.

Brendan has a nice set of documentation on his site, with instructions for getting the whole thing up and running, as well as some examples. The only thing that's missing is a performance report showing the sorts of speedups that you might be able to achieve on various problems.

If you're interested in building your own Lisp grid, check it out.


Comments:


The idea is great, but the code seems to be a good example on how not to write in Lisp...
 


I've had a couple of people comment on my poor lisp programming style as well, but none who have pointed me in the right direction (as above).
 


I think the best book to learn the good Lisp programming style is PAIP. The style used in Practical Common Lisp is also very good, though some people say that shorter package names would be better.
 


I second PAIP as being great for Lisp programming style. I would also recommend reading Peter Norvig's paper on regarding Lisp coding style. There are a bunch of nice gems in there.
 

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