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3 April 2008

It went really well. We had the back room of the Bloor Fox & Fiddle with more than enough tables and it was much quieter than the rest of the place. Around 8 people showed up this time.

What was Discussed

• ContextL
• Cells
• Art of the Meta-Object Protocol
• Someone mentioned they were replacing Perl scripts with Chicken Scheme scripts.
• Clojure was discussed, in particular how well it integrated with Java libraries and the type annotations/tagging.
• Snippet.el, an Emacs Lisp script which gives Emacs TextMate-like snippets. This means that when an abbreviation is expanded, you can press Tab to move to the next part of the abbrev that needs replacing. An example is a C-style for loop where you have to replace the variables, end condition, and iteration, not to mention the body of the loop.
• There was a University of Waterloo student who mentioned doing analysis of source code indentation and how it indicates complexity. I think this is it.

Arc was mentioned briefly but no one has really messed around with it much.

7 February 2008

We met again at the Bloor Fox & Fiddle. ~9 people showed up.

The meetup was obviously a success. We had Gary Baumgartner make an appearance with 2-4 U of T Computer Science students. He mentioned some projects he had worked on and which are listed here: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~gfb/projects/.

One interesting thing Gary mentioned is creating a course that mixes both high- and low-level languages. You would be doing the Assembly homework during the week that you're learning the Python (or Scheme or whatever) that does roughly the same thing. We also had a Common Lisp user from Montreal (he's surrounded by Schemers there *shudder* right? :P) Quite the varied gathering.

20 December 2007

On Thursday, December 20th, 2007, after 6pm at the Bloor Fox & Fiddle. 8 people showed up! Scotch and beer were drunk and drewc entertained us all with stories of the Lisp industry.

There was a Smalltalker among us as well.

An interesting subject that came up was pushing people towards or away from Lisp.

22 November 2004

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.