newlispfanclub.alh.net

http://www.livejournal.com - Livejournal - plays a unique role in Russian-language blogosphere. As compared to large US blog services, where majority of users are teenagers (e.g. the US section of LJ averaged at 19 some time ago), the Russian LJ contains people of all ages and most popular book writers, journalists, even politicians etc. etc. consider it necessary to have presence there: this gives access to widest real audience from all parts of the country and to the immigrant community in one swoop.

Where does newlisp come here? - easy. One of the bloggers used newlisp to do estimations of election vote counts (and being someone with somewhat extremist anti-russian views he, naturally, attempts to interpret a very vague statistic as a "proof" of vote rigging, as his likes are prone to, I'd say).

The interesting part of it is that his _technical_ (i.e. non-political) post on how he constructed a simple web pages crawler which downloads 2 levels of referred pages and then cuts out necessary results to export into a processing app _got 388 responses_ with all kinds of comparisons (to 2 versions of perl scripts, shell, python, and even a version in Haskell) and technical discussion.

His post at
http://fritzmorgen.livejournal.com/2483 ... rmat=light
describes his crawler in detail, giving a piece of code commented and explained line by line and so providing a sort of intro to newlisp, which stirred a surprising degree of enthusiasm.

This is not the first exposure of newlisp in Russian LiveJournal, but most of the mentioning so far ran into sniggering.
So probably what needs to be done for "spreading the word" is just small concrete snippets of code which are thorougly explained. When people see how well-working and minimalistic solutions can be created, they do not fail to get a favourable view of the language. It's probably the generalizations and talk "about" that mostly repel readers and make them throw stupido generalities back

The post is in Russian. The complete snippet can be seen here:
http://metasatanism.ru/FILES/Linux/election.lsp /* Linux */
http://metasatanism.ru/FILES/election.lsp /* Windows */

Alternatives:
http://hpaste.org/fastcgi/hpaste.fcgi/view?id=11008 /* haskell */
http://vozutat.livejournal.com/11098.html /* python */
http://what-me.livejournal.com/6815.html /* a sort of perl */
http://nponeccop.livejournal.com/152013 ... ht#t776141 /* Haskell and Bash in the comment below */

Satanism! How nice.

Ha, nice article - what I could get Google to translate, at least. Thanks for the pointer. I hope Fritz gets his UTF8 problems sorted out soon; I had thought that newLISP was good at UTF8 but have never had to prove it to myself in practice...

Thanks for a reading of my article, though. I was very surprised to find a link to it here.

After that Moscow elections I got some letters from readers, who asked to comment result and evaluate their cheating degree. So I decided to give them an instrument to convert raw-html-election to Excel format (and let them to think about it). It took about 60 minutes for me to make working crawler, and I was impressed with it: other programming languages I use are not so comfortable.

About utf8… yes, I had some problems with encoding, on Linux and Windows. As well as one guy with German Windows XP. But all my encoding problems are successfully solved already with special functions.

PS: One more "port" to other language:
http://fritzmorgen.livejournal.com/2483 ... #t46957839

Very well written post with enough details.

Comment: "А вы знаете, Франц, я лично встречал создателя Лиспа Джона Маккарти (он создал Лисп в 1958). Я был на его лекции в Стенфорде и даже заходил к нему домой. Он меня в 1993 году звал к нему студентом."

Fritz: "Удивительное дело, Вы помните 1993-й год, но не помните моего имени, которое только что прочли сверху страницы."

Translation:

Comment: [/ b] "Do you know Frantz, I have personally met the creator of Lisp, John McCarthy (Lisp, he created in 1958). I was at his lectures at Stanford, and even went to his home. He gave me in 1993 calling him a student. "

Fritz: "[/ b] It's amazing, you remember the 1993rd year, but can not remember my name, which had just read the top of the page."

Comment: "Do you know Frantz, I have personally met the creator of Lisp, John McCarthy (Lisp, he created in 1958). I was at his lectures at Stanford, and even went to his home. He gave me in 1993 calling him a student. "

Fritz: " It's amazing, you remember the 1993rd year, but can not remember my name, which had just read the top of the page."

that's what it's like when you get old. (I've heard :-)