I wrote a blog.

November 6, 2016 by Lucian Mogosanu

As previously promised, the new Tar Pit1 is almost done. It's not quite there yet, and considering the usual pace of the blog's affairs, it might take a month or two before it goes online -- besides, the non-technical reader will experience virtually zero change in reading experience; so I dare guess that this news isn't even that interesting. However, I wrote a blog! and despite this development having begun before the initial announcement, and despite its duration of a few additional months, it has all gone in perfect accordance to the initial plan.

Given all this, and moreover, given this rare occasion of working with sane tools2 I feel compelled to share my experience with the reader and do some post-design examination on the topic.

First of all, the Tar Pit Lisp Blog Scaffolding (LBS) is based upon a fundamental data structure, which I have at some point uninspiredly decided to name blist3. A blist is conceptually very similar to a dynamic symbol table, that is, a binding between a name and a value. Almost everything from blog posts to templates to tags are representable as blist objects, and thus all that the LBS needs to do is convert source objects such as Markdown files or CL-WHO templates into this intermediate representation, and then forth into the target representation, which in our case happens to be plain ol' HTML.

This approach has the advantage of uniformity: metadata (e.g. post identifiers, the author(s), the date of publication) as well as the actual data (e.g. post content) are all represented using the name-value associations within a particular unit, e.g. a post or a page. Given this, the blog programmer is left with no option but4 to manipulate blists as he or she wishes, for example by translating the body from Markdown to HTML or generating a whole new body based on existing metadata, such as for creating lists of references.

The heavy lifting is of course still done by CL-WHO and Pandoc, with some help from CL-PPCRE and some other useful bits which help keep the whole castle in one place. And despite the system's heterogeneity, the design is anything but a mash-up of arbitrary tools.

As far as development effort goes, I believe the whole thing took much less than fifty hours of implementation put together, plus around ten hours of thinking and reading the imported libraries. In fact most of the time went into learning Common Lisp5, debugging and testing being a close second and actual writing and refactoring occupying a third place.

The close-to-final result is publicly available on GitHub -- for now on a separate branch, but I expect it to converge towards the master as soon as I deem it to be ready for use in production. And make no mistake, "ready for use in production" is equivalent to "done", not unlike Roman aqueducts, the Great Wall of China and Shakespeare's works are "done"6. And when it's here, you'll see it -- soon!

  1. Tarp it! ↩

  2. Who ever had the impudence to state that software sucks?

    As a matter of fact, making software that doesn't suck isn't difficult. It only requires doing engineering for a clear purpose, or rather, stemming from a cause worthy of consideration, rather than coding for the sake of code; and it requires accepting that the only true freedom derives from understanding, that is, reading the code, rather than from mindless import universe statements; and it also requires a very specific mindset that makes all the difference between profession and mere circle-jerking.

    Not difficult at all... ↩

  3. I can't say I remember exactly why I gave it this name. It is certainly a sort of unordered list addressable by arbitrary identifiers, which makes it in fact a dictionary, which makes the current hash table-based implementation quite well-suited to the task. ↩

  4. Paradoxically! ↩

  5. By which I mean exactly Common Lisp, not a style of programming, not macros, not algorithms and not design patterns, although each of these subjects must be understood in order to fit everything in head. On the other hand the fact that so many programming systems copied Common Lisp makes it easy to recognize certain patterns in their pure form. ↩

  6. But Lucian, your blog is nowhere near the technical and artistic innovation blah-blah-yadda!

    ... or not unlike how a bowl of stew is done, m'kay? A given artifact does not have to be novel nor in any way special in order to be "done"; more so that nowadays' vast majority of software is in the vast majority of cases anything but done, to everyone's chagrin. ↩

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One Response to “I wrote a blog.”

  1. #1:
    The Tar Pit Lisp Blog Scaffolding genesis « The Tar Pit says:
    October 11, 2019 at 15:58

    [...] it should give you a superficial idea of how it works. Do mind that the code was written circa three years ago, back when I started learning that Common Lisp dialect. It is, as previously stated, rather a set [...]

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