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[boston-lisp] glowing review of Scheme-based web site
by Bruce Lewis 24 Jan '09

24 Jan '09

Hello Boston Lisp. I wasn't sure I could attend next week's interesting-looking meeting, and it seems even less likely now, but for happy reasons. I'm dealing with a lot of new users and feature requests for my Scheme-based web site after it got a good review: http://www.louisgray.com/live/2009/01/our-doings-you-upload-moment-they.html

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[boston-lisp] 2009-01-26 Boston Lisp Meeting: David O'Toole on Common Lisp and Rogue-like Games
by fare＠tunes.org 09 Jan '09

09 Jan '09

Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday January 26th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B David O'Toole on Common Lisp and Rogue-like Games David O'Toole will give a talk about Common Lisp and Rogue-like Games. The 1980 gaming classic "Rogue" and its descendants (NetHack and Angband, among many others) continue to thrill hard-core gamers, finding a new audience many years later. Part of the thrill comes from the high replayability factor brought about by the genres's randomized settings and endlessly variable play experiences; rogue-like games used "procedural content generation" a long time before it became a games-industry buzzword. These games have usually been written in C or C++, but a growing, seething mass of Lisp Rogue-likes have lurched ominously onto the scene. David will show how Rogue-like games present interesting challenges to the Lisp developer, and how he met those challenges with video demonstrations of his code in action. His software can be found at http://dto.github.com/notebook/rlx.html David O'Toole is a Lisp developer living in Central Massachusetts, USA, who works in Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp. His lifelong interest in video and computer games led him to study computer science and then to work at Irrational Games in Boston (now called 2K Boston). David is now a consultant and builds custom audio-oriented computers in his spare time. His website is at http://dto.github.com/notebook/ * The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday January 26th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor. This is the usual location, on 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge. MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34 Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us. * * Dinner: we don't yet have a sponsor this year for an after-meeting buffet, but the organizers will go someplace to have dinner and a drink not too far from the conference venue, and you'll be welcome to join us. * * * The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on November 24th had over 30 participants. Gregory Marton gave a very inspiring talk about the meanings of English words as programs, and how computers could learn such programs through various interactions. We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare(a)tunes.org.

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[boston-lisp] ILC extension
by Daniel Weinreb 13 Dec '08

13 Dec '08

Because of timing and technical difficulties, the submission deadline for the 2009 International Lisp Conference has been extended from December 9, 2009, to December 16, 2009. http://www.international-lisp-conference.org -- Dan -- ________________________________________ Daniel Weinreb http://danweinreb.org/blog/ Lisp: The Next 50 Years: http://ilc09.org

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[boston-lisp] local lisper's roguelike game
by David O'Toole 13 Dec '08

13 Dec '08

My CL roguelike game project is approaching playable alpha so I thought I would announce it here and see if anyone has comments or feedback. The project homepage is http://dto.mamalala.org/notebook/rlx.html and it is structured as a "virtual game console" for 2d roguelike-ish games. You could probably also do a basic snake game or tetris but I haven't tried this yet---instead I'm trying to create a sci-fi roguelike with (hopefully) innovative and fun combat (see page for images and video links) I live near Worcester about 45 minutes from Boston and have attended a previous Boston Lisp meeting, which I greatly enjoyed. So perhaps I could give a quick talk about the technology if there is an open space at some future meeting? I used a custom object system called CLON (see cliki entry or visit http://github.com/dto/clon ) and maybe it would be interesting to explain why I think it works for the game. I have a laptop with vga out so I could maybe hook up to the projector and give a colorful demo with plenty of explosions. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. ---Dave

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[boston-lisp] Opportunities at local startup
by Jon S. Anthony 26 Nov '08

26 Nov '08

Hi, I hope this is viewed as an appropriate message, if not please accept my apologies up front. Opportunities at startup for great developers to work on cool problems in online delivered data and document management. We are currently using Lisp for core backend components and are investigating innovative storage and representation technologies to solve extreme scaling issues and interesting problems in capturing and using semantic information. Background in traditional storage (RDBs) and newer technologies (graph stores, et. al.) significant pluses. Also strong background in either Ruby and Java as work involves these as well. Contact Jon Anthony at jon(a)aprigo.com, or reply to this email.

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[boston-lisp] Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B
by Faré 18 Nov '08

18 Nov '08

Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B Gregory Marton will give a talk about the meanings of English words as programs. http://fare.livejournal.com/136992.html Gregory will introduce a way of thinking about the meanings of English words as programs (c.f. SHRDLU), cast the problem of language learning as a search through the space of possible programs, and show first steps in learning. Gregory has created a system called Sepia that makes it relatively easy to write small lexicons that implement some semantic theory for a domain. Applications that Gregory and several colleagues have had fun with include: * understanding dates and times and other measures: "next Wednesday" * finding and linking names of people, organizations, places * telling a robot what to do with stuff on a table: "touch the red one" * asking about spatial paths in video: "show people entering the kitchen" * a toy gossip world: "John loves Mary" "Who does not hate Mary?" * a little number theory: "18 is twice the sum of its digits" These applications are inherently brittle, and manual construction gets harder as the application grows. The research goal is to construct new meaning programs with little human input, or with input from non-programmers. Given a problem phrase, Sepia uses standard ways to find similar words that it knows. Its current approach is to take the meanings of those words and makes small changes, looking for a combination that produces the target meaning. Both the system as a whole and the language of semantics are implemented in the GNU/Guile flavor of Scheme. Gregory Marton is a PhD student in computer science at MIT, and this is his dissertation topic. His first language is Hungarian, and since meeting English at age eight, he has wondered about meanings and how to learn language. He has a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Linguistics from the University of Maryland, College Park, 1999. * The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday November 24th 2008 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT, Room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor. This is the usual location, on 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge. MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34 Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us. * * Buffet: ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclosure: I work there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake. We appreciate it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos you have, so that we can order the right amount of food. Tell us by sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We won't send any acknowledgment unless requested; importantly, we'll keep your identity and address confidential and won't communicate any such information to anyone, not even to our sponsors. * * * The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on October 27th had over 30 participants. Tim McNerney gave copious background on the Thinking Machines Corporation and its line of massively parallel computer as an introduction to his work on automated verification of a compiler optimization pass through abstract interpretation. Both the presentation and the following discussion were very lively. We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare(a)tunes.org. [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] When all lawful citizens are disarmed, will we have an omnipresent police state to protect us from armed criminals?

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[boston-lisp] Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday September 29th 2008, 6pm at MIT 34-401B
by Faré 24 Oct '08

24 Oct '08

http://fare.livejournal.com/134108.html Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Monday September 29th 2008, 6pm at MIT 34-401B NB: ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclosure: I work there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake. We appreciate it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos you have, so that we can order the right amount of food. Tell us by sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We won't send any acknowledgment unless requested; importantly, we'll keep your identity and address confidential and won't communicate any such information to anyone, not even to our sponsors. * Rich Hickey will give a 90' talk about Clojure. Clojure http://clojure.org/ is a dynamic programming language that targets the Java Virtual Machine. It is designed to be a general-purpose language, combining the approachability and interactive development of a scripting language with an efficient and robust infrastructure for multithreaded programming. Clojure is a compiled language - it compiles directly to JVM bytecode, yet remains completely dynamic. Every feature supported by Clojure is supported at runtime. Clojure provides easy access to the Java frameworks, with optional type hints and type inference, to ensure that calls to Java can avoid reflection. Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, and shares with Lisp the code-as-data philosophy and a powerful macro system. Clojure is predominantly a functional programming language, and features a rich set of immutable, persistent data structures. When mutable state is needed, Clojure offers a software transactional memory system and reactive Agent system that ensure clean, correct, multithreaded designs. Rich Hickey, a New-York based software engineer, is the principal author of Clojure. * * The Lisp Meeting will take place on Monday September 29th at MIT, Room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor. MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34 Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us. I unhappily won't be able to attend for personal reasons, and I thank Richard Kreuter for accepting to be our Master of Ceremony. * * * The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on July 21st had only 30 participants. Jay McCarthy's presentation was excellent, and though his code wasn't Lisp, the spirit of it was exactly the kind of Metaprogramming that is dear to Lispers. We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] Perhaps those of us who care about quality programs have not spoken up often enough -- `for bad programs to triumph requires only that good programmers remain silent.' I call this passivity the `Silence of the Lambdas.' -- hbaker

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[boston-lisp] Boston Lisp meeting for October
by Marc Battyani 24 Oct '08

24 Oct '08

Hi, Is there a Boston Lisp meeting on Monday 2008-10-27? Cheers, Marc

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[boston-lisp] Skype user to assist with dial-in?
by Grant Rettke 09 Sep '08

09 Sep '08

Hi folks, Is there a Skype user with whom I could "dial-in" to the meetings? In particular, the one on Clojure :). Best wishes, Grant

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[boston-lisp] No Boston Lisp Meeting for August - Next Meeting in September
by Faré 12 Aug '08

12 Aug '08

No Boston Lisp Meeting for August - Next Meeting in September Due to the organizer (me) doing too many other things this summer and lacking the foresight to delegate, no speaker was found for August. I don't feel like rushing things so late in the game, so unless a surprise speaker is found on short notice, there won't be a Boston Lisp Meeting this August. But lo and behold, we have speakers for September and October. On Monday September 29th 2008, 1800, Rich Hickey will give a long talk on Clojure, his new Lisp dialect for the JVM, at the usual venue MIT 34-401B. Official announcement will follow later this month. In October (Monday 27th?), Tim McNerney will hopefully talk about his past work on verification of correctness of a compiler transformation pass through abstract interpretation. [ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ] "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away". -- Philip K. Dick

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