(Adding Arthur Smyles to the thread since he is the current organizer of LispNYC.)

For whatever it's worth, we are using Jitsi for LispNYC, both presentations and social hang-outs. The presentations are also being simulcast to YouTube. (If you'd like to drop by our talk tomorrow, the details are at https://www.meetup.com/LispNYC/events/270506803/)

It might also be worth considering combining the groups (or separating on a different axis other than geographical while we are all interacting virtually). Might also be worth having an ongoing US-East virtual Lisp group that meets every couple months post-pandemic.

On Fri, Oct 9, 2020 at 7:30 PM Alex Plotnick <shrike@netaxs.com> wrote:

At Fri, 09 Oct 2020 15:04:37 -0600, Jonathan Godbout said:

> Are people interested in having a meeting?

Yes, definitely!

> Can anyone give a talk?

I can, though it wouldn't strictly be about Lisp. My employer (osohq.com)
has been developing a logic programming language (i.e., a Prolog dialect)
focused on authorization problems, and I think both the language and its
implementation might be of interest. We've written an embeddable interpreter
in Rust that communicates via FFI to a host or application language
such as (currently) Python, Ruby, JavaScript, Java, or Rust. It has
some features inspired by Common Lisp (e.g., multiple dispatch),
but mostly it's a logic language with unification & backtracking.
Its distinguishing feature is its ability to write rules over objects
and types from the host language; e.g., whatever models an application
uses natively. We think this is useful in certain complex authorization
contexts, and perhaps more broadly.

I would in particular love to get feedback from a Lisp crowd on the
language design, syntax, etc. We tried to give it an updated feel,
but still be recognizably Prolog, and just a little Lispy. Lisp
folks tend to have pretty high standards and strong opinions on
all kinds of languages, so it'd be great to hear what people think.

> I'd be willing to give a lightning talk about cl-protobufs.

+1

> We can use Zoom instead of hangouts...

+1 from me on reliability and ease of use, though I totally understand
issues people may have with it. Jitsi's probably fine, though I have
not ever used it.

        -- Alex