The Elusive Lisp IDE

Posted on March 11, 2011 at 10:34 am by Matthew Pass

Looking round for a Lisp IDE proved frustrating. I felt sure that in 2011 there would definitely be something out there that ran on Windows and would be a rough equivalent of Visual Studio. I mean, Lisp harks back decades – surely somebody would have written a VS clone by now?

(Aside – why Windows? Well, even though I primarily use Mac OS X at home, I wanted to be able to mess around at lunchtimes at work, and we’re mandated to use XP here.)

Searching the ‘Net, I did find a few IDEs – some free; some out-of-my-reach financially – and even installed a couple to see what they were like, but… they all just felt several years behind what should be running on a PC these days.

Of course, while looking for all these development environments running on Windows, there was a massive elephant in the room… No matter where I ended up via Google, there was always the answer ‘what are you thinking? If you want do write Lisp, you’ve got to use Emacs and SLIME.’

At first, I ignored this – I definitely wanted something that ran natively on Windows, and had heard horror stories of the steep learning curve that Emacs has. But as time wore on, and I wasn’t finding any other satisfactory solution, I became more open to the idea. After all, one of my goals in learning Lisp was that I’d heard so much about it changing one as a programmer… Well, I’d also heard similar things about Emacs (‘once you get it, you’ll never look back!’).

So, with some trepidation, I decided to take the plunge…

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Tips for Writing CVs

Posted on March 9, 2011 at 5:33 pm by Matthew Pass

Part of my job is the incredibly tedious (to me) process of being involved in hiring new staff. As it happens, I mentioned how awful some CVs were in two separate conversations today, and rather than blindly nod their heads, both parties asked the far more sensible question ‘so what’s a good CV, then?’

This stumped me for a bit – it’s all too easy to take the mickey out of statements such as ‘I work well on my own, but am also a great team player,’ but more difficult to actually provide some useful guidance.

So, for what it’s worth, here are my Top Tips for Writing CVs for Programmers. Caveat – this is what I look for in CVs, not what my company – or even some of my fellow colleagues – do.

  1. Size matters. I get immediately turned off if a CV is more than three or four sides of A4.
  2. Presentation matters. It needs to read well as if somebody moderately articulate has written it. Spelling mistakes are just inexcusable.
  3. Can you do the job? Have you at least vaguely got the skills we need for the role. E.g., much of our work is C# and WinForms, so if your CV only mentiones ASP.NET I’m not interested.
  4. Back up your statements. If in your introduction you say you ‘deliver consistent results in time and in budget,’ you’d better state how in your job history.
  5. Are you a keeper? If you’re a permie that hops jobs every six months, or a contractor that hops jobs every three, I’m not really interested… unless you can back this up.
  6. Check your arithmetic. I’ve seen CVs with skills summaries containing over 100 years of experience.

If you follow this advice, you’ve got a pretty-good chance of making to the next stage of the recruitment process if your CV happens to land in my inbox.

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Learning Lisp

Posted on February 4, 2011 at 10:50 am by Matthew Pass

I’ve been lurking around Hacker News now for a while, and some time last year came across a post about a new book Land of Lisp. Now, Lisp is one of those languages that I have no experience with, but kept hearing about how awesome it is – in particular about the fact that once you ‘get’ it, it changes the way you program and think about other languages forever.

This new book seemed like an ideal introduction for me, and I’d been meaning to kick myself up the arse and do something interesting in my spare time for a while now, so I went ahead about bought it (both the paper copy – as I still kinda like physical artifacts – and the electronic edition).

So far, so good. The eBook was downloaded straight away and I started to read it, downloading CLISP and working through Chapter 2 (Creating Your First Lisp Program).

It soon became clear, however, that as a man used to Visual Studio, syntax-colouring, and an easy life, the whole typing code immediately into the REPL thing (and not even being able to edit my mistakes easily, let alone save the code off as a file, as far as I could tell) wasn’t going to cut it for me, so I started looking around for a ‘Lisp IDE…’

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