Hacker News: kaveh808

New comment by kaveh808 in "Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran"

kaveh808 — Thu, 15 Oct 2026 20:01:56 +0000

Right out of college, I wrote my first ray tracer in Fortran in the mid-80's at the Xerox Research Centre of Canada. I remember the setup being a VAX 11/750 with a RasterTech color monitor (512x512 if memory serves). [0]

My implementation was based on David Rogers' "Procedural Elements for Computer Graphics", one of only two texts available on 3D graphics, the other being Foley and VanDam.

I remember managing my own stack in a language which didn't support recursion. I learned a lot. Good times.

[0] https://medium.com/@kaveh808/8-summer-at-xerox-in-24-bit-col...

New comment by kaveh808 in "A curmudgeon tries a language server"

kaveh808 — Mon, 31 Aug 2026 18:47:13 +0000

Basically, I launch my Slime/SBCL and do my development by editing and evaluating code in my Emacs buffers. This updates the running image and I can check the results interactively. I regularly save my buffers as one does.

This process can continue for days.

There are times when I need to relaunch my Slime/SBCL and start fresh. These are usually cases where I do some refactor that eliminates some functions, or when a bug causes crashes and I feel it would be cleaner to start fresh.

All pretty common sense.

I never save my Lisp image and relaunch it. Maybe I would if I was delivering binaries, but my project is open source.

New comment by kaveh808 in "A curmudgeon tries a language server"

kaveh808 — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:08:37 +0000

I have always viewed the Emacs/Slime/CL development environment as being a more frictionless approach than the compile/link/execute approach of most other languages, but I get the impression there are people who evangelize "image-based coding" without having tried it out themselves.

The idea of not maintaining properly documented sources would terrify me.

As people point out, if you are not careful and execute arbitrary code in the REPL, your source and image can drift out of sync. When I was working on [1], I would go days without relaunching my image, but all the development was done by evaluating code in Emacs buffers and seeing the results right away. Occasionally, things got convoluted enough that I relaunched the process as a sanity check.

For me, the real benefit of iteratively modifying a live image lies in the sense of flow it engenders. I have not felt that sense in languages other than CL. I sometimes explain the feeling by saying than CL is the only language that I don't feel is fighting me.

[1] https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

New comment by kaveh808 in "Qt Creator 18 Released"

kaveh808 — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:49:17 +0000

I worked at that company: Visual Edge, in Montreal.

Demo of kons-9 Common Lisp 3D graphics system [video]

kaveh808 — Mon, 02 Jun 2025 21:45:40 +0000

Article URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjbYFaNAspw

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44163441

Points: 10

# Comments: 1

New comment by kaveh808 in "An ice cream innovator influenced Lisp pioneers at the MIT AI Lab"

kaveh808 — Thu, 06 Mar 2025 19:19:17 +0000

I wrote about this a while back. I'll assume the article is more authoritative.

https://medium.com/@kaveh808/6-object-oriented-ice-cream-fla...

New comment by kaveh808 in "My Time at MIT"

kaveh808 — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 00:34:41 +0000

I wrote a blog about some of my experiences at the then-new MIT Media Lab in 1985. Unlike the experience of the author, I was more of a lone late-night hacker (in the old sense of the word).

Thread starts here:

https://kaveh808.medium.com/from-arcmac-to-the-media-lab-229...

New comment by kaveh808 in "Ask HN: 30y After 'On Lisp', PAIP etc., Is Lisp Still "Beating the Averages"?"

kaveh808 — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 22:54:37 +0000

Right on.

The way I think of it, CL is the rare language that I don't feel is fighting me every step of the way.

New comment by kaveh808 in "NFL Reveals Ultra-Rare Lens It Uses to Capture Cinema-Style Shots"

kaveh808 — Wed, 06 Dec 2023 20:54:31 +0000

I remember reading that at one point the NFL was Kodak's biggest client for 16mm film. Back when that was the format for recording the games.

New comment by kaveh808 in "Version 100 of the MIT Lisp Machine software recovered"

kaveh808 — Tue, 05 Dec 2023 00:35:59 +0000

Perhaps I'm viewing the past through rose-colored glasses, but I wish there were such efforts at innovation in the computer field today. Maybe the last attempt at doing something truly different was the Connection Machine.

New comment by kaveh808 in "Unity Software with a 'company reset' walks away from film VFX and the Wētā Deal"

kaveh808 — Wed, 29 Nov 2023 21:10:25 +0000

I hope for the sake of my former colleagues at Weta that those transferred to Unity can simply be transferred back to Weta.

The point of production pipelines being bespoke (at least past a certain company size) is a relevant one. The main workhorses of large scale production (Maya, Houdini, Nuke, etc.) are extremely customizable and extensible. Over years (decades in the case of Weta) companies develop highly complex workflows and associated tools based on these applications.

That is why the Unity deal never really made sense to me. The idea that Weta's tools could somehow be packaged up and delivered as essentially shrink-wrapped consumer-level add-ons to Unity was a naive one at best. I'm not entirely surprised to see it fall apart.

New comment by kaveh808 in "Blender 4.0 release notes"

kaveh808 — Tue, 14 Nov 2023 20:18:11 +0000

Is there any movement towards a C/C++ API in Blender 4.0? I feel extensibility may be where it lags behind Maya and Houdini.

New comment by kaveh808 in "Lindenmayer Systems"

kaveh808 — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 20:38:21 +0000

Very cool. I must check this out.

I implemented some L-system features in my 3D Common Lisp system: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

New comment by kaveh808 in "Ask HN: Show me your half baked project"

kaveh808 — Thu, 12 Oct 2023 21:42:47 +0000

kons-9: https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

Work in progress on an IDE for 3D graphics written in Common Lisp.

Cheesy trailers:

https://youtu.be/THMzaVDaZP8

https://youtu.be/i0CwhEDAXB0

https://youtu.be/liaLgaTOpYE

New comment by kaveh808 in "Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (1992)"

kaveh808 — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 21:15:10 +0000

Yes. Though unfortunately CCL does not run on Apple's M chips.

New comment by kaveh808 in "Vulkan Documentation"

kaveh808 — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 19:53:08 +0000

"Vulkan represents a low-level way of talking to the GPU more or less on the GPU's terms. As opposed to OpenGL which is a way of talking to the GPU on boomer CAD programmers' terms."

Kind of like that description. I've been doing GL since before it was OpenGL.

In my Common Lisp 3D system [1], I've been happily using very simple immediate mode OpenGL calls, taking advantage of CAD-like features such as drawing wireframes of various thickness over shaded polygons. OpenGL provides specific Z-buffer API calls to facilitate such things.

Is there a simple way of doing such CAD-centric things in Vulkan?

[1] https://github.com/kaveh808/kons-9

New comment by kaveh808 in "Common Lisp: An Interactive Approach (1992)"

kaveh808 — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 19:18:38 +0000

Some basic Common Lisp videos showing Emacs/Slime in action:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLTA6M4yZF0MzsMlNL0N67...

New comment by kaveh808 in "Article reply “Godot is not the new Unity” from Juan Linietsky (BDFL of Godot)"

kaveh808 — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 20:07:23 +0000

The killer feature of whatever game engine replaces Unity in developers' hearts and minds is going to be the platform delivery aspect.

Once you can press a button and get Win/Mac/Linux/Android/iOS/etc versions of your game built, you're in business.

All the higher-level features (3D, ray casting, etc) will be contributed by the community over time.

New comment by kaveh808 in "How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people"

kaveh808 — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 20:22:26 +0000

MCL was a delight to program in. Ran in 2MB on my PowerBook 170 and gave high-level support for GUI development.

It lives on a Clozure Common Lisp, though there is no version for Apple M processors. Kind of a shame.

New comment by kaveh808 in "Ron Cobb – Filmography"

kaveh808 — Mon, 18 Sep 2023 18:35:26 +0000

His book "Colorvision" is a rich and wonderful book of design. I spent so many hours flipping through it.