Kent Pitman's Commentary

Technology

Interviews

Slashdot

In the Fall of 2001, I was interviewed in Slashdot about Lisp and Scheme.

Ask Kent M. Pitman About Lisp, Scheme And More: The call for questions (published Oct 12, 2001), a process I was not involved with.
Kent M. Pitman Answers On Lisp And Much More: Part 1 of my response (published Nov 8, 2001).
Kent M. Pitman's Second Wind: Part 2 of my response (published Nov 13, 2001).

The term "second wind" is a bit of a misnomer there. I didn't decide suddenly to answer a bunch more questions. Rather, my answers were long enough to collectively exceed the fixed length their site had allocated for such articles, and though I offered to edit it, they liked the responses and said they'd run my response in two parts.

Someone hand-translated my responses to Turkish, but alas the translations seem to have gone offline. I'm sorry now that I didn't save copies locally.

Produktiver programmieren

The authors' interview with me in 2002 was done in English. They translated my remarks to German for publication of this book, whose title in English would be Program More Productively.

You can obtain a copy from Amazon in Germany.

Magazines

Parenthetically Speaking (in Lisp Pointers)

From 1992-1995, I wrote a recurring column, Parenthetically Speaking with Kent Pitman, for the ACM print publication Lisp Pointers. Here are the six articles that resulted from that endeavor:

dpANS Common Lisp: Don't Judge a Spec by its Cover!
What's in a Name?: Uses and Abuses of Lispy Terminology
The Best of Intentions: EQUAL Rights--and Wrongs--in Lisp
Accelerating Hindsight: Lisp as a Vehicle for Rapid Prototyping
More Than Just Words: Lambda, the Ultimate Political Party
Ambitious Evaluation: A New Reading of an Old Issue

Politics

Blogging Past and Present

Blogspot

My current blog, netsettlement, is hosted by Google at BlogSpot (also called Blogger).

Although my Literary Creations page is not specifically about this blog, it is still the best place to look for suggested reading.

Open Salon

I used to blog at Open Salon (open.salon.com), which was a wonderful and supportive community of writers that encouraged me to write a lot. Alas, Salon.com managed that site poorly and eventually had to shut it down because it was overrun by spammers.

A summary of (and some recommendations about) my Open Salon writings, are available.

Some of my Open Salon articles have been re-hosted at Blogspot for easier access. (I've tried to match the titles and publication dates, though when I did that, the many excellent comments I'd received were left behind, and are only available via the Wayback Machine at archive.org.)

Thinking Allowed

Before Open Salon, I published political articles to this site (nhplace.com) in an area I called Thinking Allowed.

KMP’s PFAQ

Before I went for an article format, I sometimes just wrote answers to questions about things I thought about in something I dubbed a “Personal FAQ” (PFAQ). This amounted to what people would later come to call a blog, but there was no special support for producing these. You can still visit KMP’s PFAQ, and some of the topics are still even relevant.

Public Feedback

These days I do a lot of my public feedback via Twitter or my blog. Occasionally, however, things call for other kinds of communication. I've written open letters and responded to public calls for feedback:

An Open Letter to CPSR

I wrote an open letter to CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, that was published in their Spring, 1994 newsletter.
The CPSR Newsletter, Volume 12, No. 2 (Spring, 1994)

I was a lifetime member of CPSR, and am sad to say that the organization has folded because it did great work. Their website persists, however, and a number of members remain connected by email and active discussions continue now and then in spite of that.

WIPO Feedback

In June, 2005, WIPO (the World Intellectual Property Organization) was inviting feedback related to copyright and patent law. My comments are here. Among other things, I suggested that with the move toward DRM, “fair use” is impeded in a way that calls for the creation of an intellectual property “easement” (by analogy with real property easements).

Entertainment

Sometimes I write reviews of books and movies.

Best Movie of All Time: “Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan”: I argue this is not just the best sci-fi movie of all time, but the best movie of all time. Yes, better even than Citizen Kane.

Kent Pitman’s