For about a year now (*) I've been receiving the free zine Queue, published by the ACM. I highly recommend it, especially for software developers, like myself, who enjoy reading up on interesting CS-related research even outside my work area, but don't want to wade through dense technical journals seeking such diversion. I renewed my Queue subscription for next year, which I would have done even if it weren't free.

The most recent Dec/Jan issue of Queue has a great interview of Alan Kay, the coinventor of Smalltalk and recipient of the ACM Turing Award. One thing he mentioned was that in grad school he was reading the Lisp 1.5 Manual and noticed a piece of Lisp example code that actually implements a Lisp interpreter. The cool thing is that interpreter is quite short, yet complete.

This comment reminded me of a class I took on Programming Languages at Indiana University (essentially, this course, about 7 years ago). Prof. Dan Friedman had us implement a Scheme interpreter in Scheme and the result was an impressively short and elegant bit of code! He even advocated that we copy the interpreter onto a small note card and keep it in our shirt pocket! I declined ... Still, it was a cool project, and an important lesson in how compact the language was.

(*) Also, for about a year now, I haven't posted to my blog. But now I'm on parental leave and have felt a strong urge to post. Will you forgive me?