Recently I’ve been working on a personal project (a Tinder bot integrated with ChatGPT and using Telegram Bot API as UI). I started out with a small prototype in Ruby (like 40 lines script) however then I switched to Common Lisp.

The reason for it was that I wanted to use the language for a while but couldn’t bring myself to (because I hate LISP-2 and I also thought and still do that CL is a language equivalent of a dumpster).

My opinion of the language hasn’t changed but I did love the experience. And now I’m gonna try to explain why.

I’ve been reading my old essays and found this one written in Russian back in 2019.

Essentially, it describes a Ruby gem (library) I had written that allows you to create your own validation DSL as a bunch of functions and data. It emphises simplicity and flexibility. I thought it had a really interesting idea behind it so I’m going to rehash it here.

The below can be applied to any language (admittedly, it’ll be less convenient in some). I wrote examples in Ruby and Clojure.

Originally posted on medium.com

I enjoy experimenting with programming paradigms and trying out some interesting (to me) ideas (some things become posts, like this and that). Recently I decided to see if I can write object-oriented code in a functional language.