Toronto
The latest Toronto Lisp User's Group is hosted at: http://www.lisptoronto.org/


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:

  1. More beer
  2. Lisp-related Presentations at e.g. libraries, classrooms, etc.
One thing which occurs to me is that there are long-running Linux and BSD users' Groups in Toronto which use a classroom from the U of T for technical discussion, presentations, etc., and then head over to a local restaurant for dinner. Some folks come for both, some just for the presentations, some just for the dinner, and the format seems to work pretty well. Finally, many thanks to Bill Clementson who got this organised. I hope we can do it again soon.