People who have attended a Denver-Boulder Lisp Users Group meeting:
  • Alexander Repenning - CU professor & AgentSheets software in Lisp. Professional use of Lisp.
  • Andri Ioannidou - AgentSheets software in Lisp. Professional use of Lisp.
  • Bill Clementson - Software Architect for J.D. Edwards. Some professional use of Lisp.
  • Eric Blood - Consultant for Broadvision. Personal use of Lisp.
  • Gordon Weakliem - Systems Engineer, Galileo International. Learning Lisp for personal use.
  • Larry Hunter - CU professor & Bioinformatics researcher. Professional use of Lisp.
  • Patrick Fogarty - Personal use of Lisp.
  • Steve Smith - Analog Circuit Designer for Fairchild Semiconductor. Personal use of Lisp.
  • Sam Falkner - Sun Microsystems. Some of professional use of Lisp.
The first Denver Area Lisp Users Group Meeting is on Friday March 14th, at 7pm, at Pints Pub (221 W 13th Ave, Denver, 303-534-7543). Feel free to contact me for more info. Meeting summary: General discussions on lisp with food and beer consumption. Our second meeting is on Monday, April 28th at about 7pm in Boulder at: Mountain Sun Pub and Brewery 1535 Pearl Street Boulder, CO 80302 It is located near the Army Navy Store just East of Pearl Street Mall. Here's a link to a map: http://maps.yahoo.com/py/maps.py?Pyt=Tmap&ed=kSXxpep_0TrlfrSb4U2bmBp16r5zC94e_TAFqEeiiwBZvH8kKGVdaCvukMq8IA--&csz=Boulder,+CO+80302&country=us Larry Hunter will be presenting an overview of the Bioinformatics work that his group does. In addition, he will tell us a bit about his computational facility (which he believes to be the biggest, fastest lisp machine ever built). It's an IBM p690 (their current fastest machine) with 16 processors, 100GB of RAM (yes, that's right, GB), and a 64 bit Franz Allegro CL. Meeting summary: Last Monday (Apr 28), we got together for our second meeting. Larry Hunter presented an overview of the Bioinformatics work that his group does. It was a really interesting talk (how would you like to have an IBM p690 with 16 processors and 100GB of RAM as your personal workstation :-) ) and plenty of beer was consumed. Larry also showed us a presentation that he gives called "Why Lisp?". He gave me permission to make it generally available, so I'm posting a link to it here and on the ALU web site: http://home.attbi.com/~bc19191/why-lisp.ppt There were 7 attendees at the meeting, 4 who use lisp to some extent in their day jobs and 3 who are interested in lisp but don't use it at work yet. The third meeting of the Denver Area Lisp Users Group will be on Monday, June 2nd. Alex Repenning and Andri Ioannidou have volunteered to give a presentation on AgentSheets - an agent-authoring tool written in Lisp. They have a web site with information on the product at: http://agentsheets.com/ We will be meeting at 6pm in their company's office in the Gunbarrell area (northeast of Boulder). The address is: 6560 Gunpark Dr. Suite D Boulder, CO 80301 phone: (303) 530-1773 Mapquest map: http://www.mapquest.com/maps/map.adp?country=US&addtohistory=&address=6560+Gunpark+Dr.+Suite+D%0D%0A&city=Boulder&state=CO&zipcode=80301&homesubmit=Get+Map Meeting summary: On Monday, June 2nd we had our third Denver Area Lisp Users Group meeting. Alex Repenning, (Paul Phifer) and Andri Ioannidou gave a really interesting presentation on AgentSheets - an agent-authoring & simulation-creation tool written in Common Lisp (MCL). The intial development of the product was done with MCL - they sell a Mac version based on MCL and have an upcoming OSX version using the (newly released) version of MCL. For their first Windows product, they converted the MCL product to Java. Interestingly, they may release future Windows versions in Lisp. We saw demos of a number of different simulations that they had created with the tool including a mud-slide simulation, a soccer simulation (potential RoboCup entry??), a bridge stress test simulation, a game of life simulation, a pac man simulation and a virus simulation. In addition, they gave us an early peek at an upcoming 3d OpenGL version of the product (written using the latest version of MCL for OSX). The 3d simulations included a bus tracking application that is being done for Boulder's RTD service (with PDA's providing information on bus locations to commuters and the server display overlaying 3d buses on a map of Boulder) and a distributed human being simulation (with PDA's controlling different characteristics of a human's anatomy) - this one was a lot of fun! They have a web site with information on the product and links to info on a lot of the existing simulations at: http://agentsheets.com/ Info on Mr. Vetro, the human being simulation can be found at http://www.agentsheets.com/about_us/documents/C5%20Flier.pdf Info on the bus tracking application can be found at http://www.agentsheets.com/about_us/documents/Mobility%20Agents%20Flier.pdf In addition to enjoying the AgentSheets presentation (and in keeping with lisp user group tradition), the group consumed Mexican food and alcoholic beverages and had some interesting conversations on XML parsers for lisp and the upcoming ILC-2003 conference. Topic: Test-driven development in Lisp, LispWorks 4.3 for the Mac & other topics Presenter: Eric Blood Meeting Location: Longmont Public Library, 409 4th Avenue, Longmont Colorado (Map) Date: Monday, September 15, 2003 Time: 7pm - 8pm (meeting at library), 8pm - ?? (drinks at The Lefthand Taphouse or another brewery across the street.) Summary of the meeting: Eric walked us through a lisp project that he has been working on using the development approach outlined in Kent Beck's book Test-Driven Development. There was a bit of discussion about the pros/cons of the approach and the scenarios where it would be most appropriate to use it. After about an hour, we walked over to the local pub to carry on our discussions. Topic: Using Emacs as a Lisp IDE Presenter: Bill Clementson Meeting Location: Conor O'Neil's Irish Pub, 1922 13th Street - Boulder, Colorado. (Map) Date: Tuesday, October 7, 2003 Time: 7pm - ?? Summary of the meeting: Bill Clementson gave a dry run of his ILC2003 presentation. Topic: Developing a weblog using PLT Scheme, SSAX, and the SXML tools Presenter: Gordon Weakliem Venue: Pints Pub (221 W. 13th Avenue, Denver, ph: 303-534-7543) - probably one of the upstairs tables Date: Monday, November 17, 2003 Time: 7pm - ?? Venue: Pints Pub (221 W. 13th Avenue, Denver, ph: 303-534-7543) - probably one of the upstairs tables. (Map) Description: Gordon has been working towards developing a weblog using PLT Scheme, SSAX, and the SXML tools. He's getting close to having the rendering side ready, and hopes to at least be able to support either the Atom posting API or the WFW comment API as well.