On Monday, November 22nd, 2004, six folks local to Southern Ontario met up with Bill Clementson for beer and Lisp talk.
Bill met six of us at the Bedford Academy in downtown Toronto. We
discussed many things, including the Lisp history, our interests and
professions, Toronto, New Zealand, and Canadian geography and culture,
to name a few. In the end, there was unanimous agreement to try to
hold another meeting, about which more later.
In attendance were:
Bill Clementson
Bill's professional Lisp use is to prototype new applications for
PeopleSoft. As an architect, he doesn't write code which sees
production, and is consequently free to write in whatever language he
wants. Naturally, he chooses Lisp. :)
Dave Woodcock
Dave was trained as a mathematician - his speciality is, or rather was,
representation theory. He moved into computing due to a dearth of
academic jobs in the UK in the late nineties. He has a general
interest in programming languages, with recent interests being Lisp
and Scheme. Dave runs the Toronto office of Anvil Software
Limited, a UK-based company specialising in software systems and
consultancy for financial markets.
Byron Fast
Byron was very excited by the Yahoo Store, and learned that the store
editor was implemented in Lisp. He decided that he had to learn how
to make web apps this easy, and has made his way well down that path.
Currently, he uses Allegro Common Lisp
as part of his order processing system for his Vacuum Tube online store. Clearly, audiophiles use Lisp. His next project is a media-rich client/server
system where Flash clients interact with Lisp servers.
Paul Tarvydas
Paul's company Visual Frameworks uses Lispworks to write programming front-ends for embedded systems. His system circumvents conventional, and he assured us very limited, programming methods, and allows operators to program embedded terminals graphically. This speeds up
development, while reducing the bug-count.
Bob Hutchison
Bob runs a company called Recursive Design which makes tools for
generating Java applications from XML. He told us that while it was
difficult to explain, it was easy to demonstrate with real problems,
which sounds like good demonstration fodder to me. He's is in the
process of converting his company's software infrastructure, which is
currently written in Java, to Lispworks.
Hao Qian
Hao just finished his Ph.D in Operations Management at the Rotman
School of Management. He was working on numerical models for
multi-site call-centre load-balancing, and found that a Lisp dialect
called Lush was a
fantastic tool for expressing his thoughts.
Eric Moncrieff
I do not use Lisp at work, unfortunately, except as the most powerful
desktop calculator I can find. I have installed Lisppaste running on
SBCL and have been hacking around the Free Lisp world for a couple of years.
Future Directions
All agreed that we should hold future meetings. Suggested formats included:
- More beer
- Lisp-related Presentations at e.g. libraries, classrooms, etc.