Mike Schaeffer's Blog

This is a bash function definition that takes you to the top level directory of a git project.

function cdtop() {
    local git_root;

    git_root=`git rev-parse --show-toplevel`;

    if [ $? -eq 0 ]
    then
        cd ${git_root}
    else
        return 1
    fi
}

Here's a git alias that does serves a similar purpose. What this does is define a new alias, exec, that executes a shell command in the current project's root.

git config --global alias.exec '!exec '

With this alias defined, you can say the following and it will take you to the project root.

cd `git exec pwd`

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/957928/is-there-a-way-to-get-the-git-root-directory-in-one-command

Since my last post, I dropped by an Apple Store to take a look at the 2015 MacBook. It is difficult to overstate how startlingly small the new machine is in person. I may be biased by the internal specifications, but the impression is much more 'big tablet' than 'small laptop'. The other standout feature was the touchpad. It continues Apple's tradition of high-quality touchpad implementations, removes the mechanicical switch and hinge, and adds force sensititivy and haptic feedback. The mechanical simplifications alone are a worthwhile improvement.

I also spent some time typing on the keyboard. It's as shallow as you'd think, but the keys are very direct have a positive feel. There's none of the subtle rattling found on most small keyboards and it registered every keypress. I'm not completely convinced yet, but it at least seems possible that this type of keyboard could become the preferred keyboard for some typists.

The performance of the machine is also a point of interest. Even the lightly loaded demo machine on the showroom floor had a few hiccups paging the display around from one virtual desktop to the next. Maybe it's nothing, but it does make me wonder if the machine can keep up with daily use, particuarly after a few OSX updates have been released. (For me, I think it'd be fine, but I spend most my time in Terminal, Emacs, and Safari, none of which are exactly heavy-hitters.)

Update 2019-01-17: KSM recently redesigned their website in a way that removes the original blog. Because of this, I've taken some of what I wrote then for KSM and re-hosted it here. Thanks are due both to KSM Technology Partners for allowing me to do this and to the Wayback Machine for retaining the content. All the links below are updated to reflect the articles' new locations.

Sorry for the radio silence, but recently I've been focusing my writing time on the KSM Techology Partners Blog. My writing there is still technical in nature, but it tends to be more heavily focused on the JVM. If you're interested, here are a few of what I consider to be the highlights.

In mid-2013, I started out writing about how to use Runnable to explictly enforce dynamic extent in Java. In a nutshell, this is a way to implement try...with...resources in versions of Java that don't have it built in to the language. I then used the dynamic extent technique to build a ThreadLocal that plays nicely with thread pools. This is useful because thread pools require an understanding of which thread you're running on, which thread pooling techniques can abstract away.

Later in the year, I focused more on Clojure, starting off with a quick bit on the relationship of lexical closures to Java inner classes. I also wrote about a particular kind of stack overflow exception that can happen with lazy sequences. Lazy sequences can nicely remove the need to use recursion while traversing their length, but each time two unrealized lazy sequences are combined, it adds to the recursive depth required to compute the first element. For me, this stack overflow was a difficult error to diagnose, because it seemed so counter-intuitive.

I'm also in the middle of a series of posts that relate the GoF command pattern to functional programming. The posts start off with Java, but will ultimately describe a Clojure implementation that compiles a stack based expression language into optimized Java bytecode. If you'd like to play with the code, it's on github.

• Middle School Math, Reverse Polish Notation, and Software Design
• RPN Calc, Part 1 - A Simple Calculator in Java and the Command Pattern
• RPN Calc, Part 2 - Composite Commands
• RPN Calc, Part 3 - Undo
• RPN Calc, Part 4 - A Noun for State
• RPN Calc, Part 5 - Eliminating the Globals
• RPN Calc, Part 6 - Refactoring the REPL with an Iterator
• RPN Calc, Part 7 - Refactoring Loops with Reduce
• RPN Calc Part 8 – Moving to Clojure
• RPN Calc Part 9 – State and Commands in Clojure
• RPN Calc Part 10 – Macros and the Intent of the Code

In my Lisp programming, I find myself using Anaphoric Macros quite a bit. My first exposure to this type of macro (and deliberate variable capture) was in Paul Graham's On Lisp. Since I haven't been able to find Emacs Lisp implementations of these macos, I wrote my own.

The first of the two macros is an anaphoric version of the standard if special form:

(defmacro aif (test if-expr &optional else-expr)
  "An anaphoric variant of (if ...). The value of the test
expression is locally bound to 'it' during execution of the
consequent clauses. The binding is present in both consequent
branches."
  (declare (indent 1))
  `(let ((it ,test))
     (if it ,if-expr ,else-expr)))

The second macro is an anaphoric version of while:

(defmacro awhile (test &rest body)
  "An anaphoric varient of (while ...). The value of the test
expression is locally bound to 'it' during execution of the body
of the loop."
  (declare (indent 1))
  (let ((escape (gensym "awhile-escape-")))
    `(catch ',escape
       (while t
         (let ((it ,test))
           (if it
               (progn ,@body)
             (throw ',escape ())))))))

What both of these macros have in common is that they emulate an existing conditional special form, while adding a local binding that makes it possible to access the result of the condition. This is particularly useful in scenarios where a predicate function returns a true value that contains useful information beyond t or nil.