It has been a few years that I have spent the New Year Holiday to update my Common Lisp libraries and to think about all the open parentheses that are left unclosed. This year is no different, only I have had even less time to work on CL. Therefore, my updates to my libraries on common-lisp.net and Sourceforge all have had some minor repairs and copyright updates. As usual, I direct you to HEΛP and CLAST; most of my other libraries are support for these two.
One effort, I would like to finalize in the coming year (that is; closing this parenthesis) is the CL-LIA layer/library. Help is wanted for this! Drop me a line if you want to chip in. The main issues are API designs around the floating point environment condition handling.
Apart from that, I have been looking more and more to the future, that is, Julia (I should have listened more to some people in the CL community years ago), and... in the past.
Julia and Cancer Research
I have advised a student to work on Julia and the result is this nice (very rough) simulator for solid tumors with input from images and tracking of cells lineages: SOPHYSM. SOPHYSM builds on J-Space which is the simulator core; you can find the publication at BMC Bioinformatics.
I am currently pushing Julia to my research group, especially for new AI and ML applications to Data Analisys in Cancer Research (cfr., Data and Computational Biology Laboratory at Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca). This is because new Julia ML and AI frameworks have become much more solid in recent months; in particular Flux and SciML.ai.
Programming Archeology
If you have followed my older posts, you know I fell into a rabbit hole (with several side tunnels). I have been dabbling with very old technology, which turned out to be ... fun (don't tell my Department Head!).
I will just say that now I can understand the vagaries of
PL/I
(where do you think that loop and generic functions come from?) and that I can
write decent
Fortran IV (66)
(downgrading from Fortran 77). And yes! I can compile my program on
Hercules
(of course using Emacs to submit jobs to
MVS TK5; some work required).
Happy Hacking and Science Year!
That's it. These are my report for 2023, and my wishes for you all in 2024.
Just one more thing: you reader know that I am becoming and old geezer. I somehow rationalize my dabbling with parentheses and even older stuff as "taking care" of things that should not be lost; even if now we have Julia.
Let's all try to take care of each other and the world, of the old things and of the new ones that will inherit it.
'(peace)
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