Scheme, the dialect of Lisp invented by Guy Lewis Steele, Jr., and Gerald Jay Sussmann, is my first love among programming languages, though I haven’t always been faithful. There’s a new draft standard for Scheme now circulating at http://www.r6rs.org/. The proposal is open for comments until next March; on final approval it will become “The […]

For those who’ve been waiting patiently… My book Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape is just out in paperback. Except for the cover and the price, it’s identical to the hard-cover edition (errors and all!). Statistics:

characters: 1,302,389
words: 219,748
sentences: 10,940
pages: 541
photographs: 735
weight: 4.6 pounds
dimensions: 10.3 x 10.3 x 1.2 inches
list price: $49.95 (US) hardbound, […]

Euclid famously said, “There is no royal road to geometry.” Among the non-royal roads, the computational pathway is notably muddy, rutty and potholed. Over the weekend I needed to write a program for a simple geometric task—finding the intersection of two line segments in the plane. It’s Wednesday Thursday now, and I finally have my […]