Next Boston Lisp Meeting: Tuesday May 27th 2008, 6pm at MIT 34-401B

NB: ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (full disclosure: I work there), has kindly offered to sponsor a dinner for our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Please send mail to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net with a list of attendees so we may order the correct amount of food.

Ivan Krstić will give a 25' talk about Security and Programming Languages. Ivan Krstić http://radian.org/ is notably the prized author of Bitfrost, the security architecture for the OLPC XO laptop.

Greg Cooper will give a 50' talk about FrTime: A Dataflow Extension of DrScheme. Dataflow programming extends functional programming with time-varying values called signals. Signals provide a simple, declarative mechanism for expressing event-driven programs without callbacks or explicit side-effects. This talk will present FrTime, an extension of PLT Scheme with dataflow evaluation. The language's distinguishing features include an event-driven evaluation model, transparent reuse of Scheme code, support for reactive data structures, and integration with the DrScheme programming environment. The talk will include a demonstration of the language and programming environment, along with a discussion of the key design decisions and main ideas underlying the implementation strategy. Greg Cooper developed FrTime while he was a graduate student at Brown University, working with Shriram Krishnamurthi. He now works for ITA Software.

Please note that the meeting is taking place at an unusual date, to accommodate for the availability of our main speaker.

The Lisp Meeting with take place 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

PS: The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on April 22nd was a success with 40 participants, despite a few organizational glitches for which I apologize. Thanks a lot to all those who came. I hope we'll meet again and have more of those interesting conversations.

PPS: We're still looking for speakers. We have a lot of potential speakers, but not enough confirmed speakers at scheduled dates. The call for speakers and all the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html

PPPS: Please forward this information to people who 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 ] Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots.

So far, the Universe is winning. -- Rich Cook