Welcome to Berksoft
1. Stuff on this site
1.1. The Genius of Lisp
The Genius of Lisp is a book on the history of Lisp and the people behind it. This is the official companion page to the book.
2. What is Berksoft?
The full name is Berkeley Software of Canada, the name under which we provide consulting services mainly around Common Lisp.
Our main project is based on Christopher Alexander’s work and tries to find ways to help people create designs according to the ideas he laid out in his seminal work, The Nature of Order. We maintain a source code tree under the Berksoft name, which will be published here as a semi-literate program in due time. Until then, this site will serve as background reading but also as a sort of public notepad.
Berkeley, Ontario predates Berkeley, California by around 13 years. The post office in Berkeley, Ont. was opened in 1853 and Berkeley, CA was founded in 1866.
Berksoft is located in Berkeley, Ontario, and the name is a homage to the somewhat silly naming schemes of, mostly, the 1980s.
Note that “we”, for now, is a pluralis majestatis or sorts, as for now, it is a one person shop owned and operated by Cees de Groot.
2.1. What’s with the name and the logo?
“Berk” is Dutch for “Birch”, hence the tree. And if you look good, it’s firmly rooted with a lambda sign, which stand for Lisp’s origins.
2.2. Strange website design you’ve got there.
That is Edward Tufte’s CSS which got generated using ox-tufte with GNU Emacs’ Org Mode as the source. This site truly is standing on the shoulders of some giants. Using org-mode, it becomes simple to maintain the site in a manageable and powerful text-based format; all that needs to be done is hit the “export to HTML” button to get the static site.
2.3. Usage rights
It is expressly forbidden to use any content on this domain for training AI models. If you think this is overly restrictive, please contact me.