rob levy wrote:

> > The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on May 28th was

> > a success despite only 34 participants.

> Could be the light rain, or maybe people are intimidated

> by the high concentration of elite lisp hackers

I'm rarely intimidated by either of these, but, FWIW, it could be the advanced registration for food.  I often only know with only a certain percent confidence that I'll be able to go, so I generally don't respond saying I'll be there.  Then when the event comes around I figure I haven't said I'd be there and tend to be conservative about going to things that require headcounts where I didn't say I'd be there.  I have never made a decision wholly on this basis, but more than once the nature of the food headcount has weighed into my decision not to come in a kind of "inertial" way that is hard to articulate but I think is nevertheless worth mentioning.

I don't think it's bad to take a headcount, but I think it's critical to say how you want people who aren't sure to respond and to emphasize that they should still come if they haven't signed up, if that's what you want them to do, so that those with the personality to think that's "party crashing" won't feel that way.  People differ culturally on this and the fact that some people may think this is obvious does not imply all people do.

Even so, though, I think it's natural for people to fall off some in attendance and to go only sometimes.  I was surprised that you went for an every-month thing, figuring that was very ambitious.  I only ever planned to attend sometimes, and continue to hope on a month-by-month basis that I'll find the time.

> One thing I was thinking about that would be really interesting

> would be a talk about Lisp Machines,

You're in the right town for that.  But Lisp Machines are a big topic area.  That's kind of like a talk on "the C language and things it has been used for".  And the communities started off the same and then diverged into different cultures such that everyone's reality was not even the same.  But even glossing that, there are issues of operating system, editing environment file system, editing tools, mail reading, patching tools, marketplace, etc.