And I find the remote learning experience gratifying. I have to thank Professor Ng for the quality of the materials, as well as the high level of the teaching: theoretical lessons are crystal clear, exercises are perfectly described, the Q&A support is excellent and the submitting system for programming exercises is godsend.

I have to recognise how difficult would have been to go through this course alone. But with the support of the Q&A web area is fairly easy to move forward. So, for now, I think this kind web teaching is perfectly possible, but some kind of support is needed for people without any previous experience. Web Q&A is ok, but for novices, local study groups are completely necessary.

So, after finishing the first batch of Octave exercise, let’s go for the next lesson: Logistic Regression.

• Condition style guide by Nikodemus Siivola
• Beyond Exception Handling: Conditions and Restarts from the always great Practical Common Lisp

(defun |#q-reader| (stream sub-char numarg)
  (declare (ignore sub-char numarg))
  (let ((terminator (read-char stream)))
    (loop for ch = (read-char stream)
          until (eql ch terminator)
          collect ch into chars
          finally (return (coerce chars 'string)))))
 
(set-dispatch-macro-character
    #\# #\q #'|#q-reader|)

More information in Space Station Lambda.

You can find CL-INTERPOL in Edi Weitz’s website.

Qitab is the final name of the project ITA will use to publish its lisp code.

The first project in Qitab is POIU a replacement for ASDF that will compile each of your ASDF systems in parallel.

Also, ITA published XCVB, a compillation tool for SBCL. Zach wrote a post about it in May.

ITA is known in lisp world for being a proud user of lisp in software development world, and contributing to existing lisp projects (from SBCL to slime). They’re also vocal about lisp use in today’s most complex problems (low fare search engine is one of their business) so they’re widely respected.

They will be publishing generally purpose libraries and utilities. No Airline Industry code will be published.

Additional information will be found in the devel and announce mailing lists.

Update: ITA has changed the project name, more information in the following post.

PCall, or parallel call, is a Common Lisp library intended to simplify ‘result-oriented’ parallelism. It uses a thread pool to concurrently run small computations without spawning a new thread. This makes it possible to exploit multiple cores without much extra fuss.

CL-STM

CL-STM is an extension of Common Lisp to support composable Software Transactional Memory. STM makes concurrent programming qualitatively better. Instead of traditional lock-based programming, you program with atomic transactions. Atomic transactions can be composed together to make larger atomic transactions. Finally, it just so happens that transactions run in parallel, and are rolled back if there are conflicts.

STM gives us freedom from deadlock, automatic roll-back on failure, and it resolves the tension between granularity and concurrency.