Michael Lee [lee@iit.edu] wrote:

Hi --- I'm a recent sign-up from the city. Could anyone briefly describe what would be on the agenda of such a meeting, if it were to take place?

Wow, an agenda? I dunno know about all that <smile>. How about we start with some introductions, why we've subscribed to the list, etc.? I suppose that I should eventually get around to writing up my Road To Lisp http://www.cliki.net/The%20Road%20to%20Lisp%20Survey, eventually.

Basically, I'm hoping that Chicago Lisp will be a chance to not be the only person I know, aside from comp.lang.lisp, interested in Lisp. I've been working for Motorola for the past eight years, developing software related to the core mobile telephony network primarily in C/C++ during that time, though I've been working on/with a test execution system written in Tcl for the past year and a half, more or less. Before that, I was an undergraduate student at Marquette University, where I was first exposed to Lisp in an "Intro to AI" class. It was the typical intro to Lisp. The list was the only data structure mentioned. It was, oddly enough, a Lisp implementation running on VAX/VMS. Probably only had an interpreter. I really liked Lisp when I first encountered it, for some reason, I actually liked all the parenthesis, but never had much of a chance to do anything with it after that one class. I was reminded of Lisp, interestingly enough, by reading things about multiple dispatch in C++ from Scott Meyers, Andrei Alexandrescu, and Bjarne Stroustrup, usually mentioning that CLOS already had builtin support for it. I also ran across some stuff on /. http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=lisp http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=slashdot+lisp: Lisp as an Alternative to Java, Kent Pitman's interview, etc. And since then, I've read Paul Graham's _ANSI Common Lisp_, CLTL2, _Object Oriented Programming in Common Lisp_, and I'm still working through PAIP and AMOP.

All of this reading is all well and good but <pause> well, it's just reading. I wish I had an excuse to use Lisp in anger. I've been sneaking it into silly little utilities; I don't always reach for Perl anymore. I have aikido lessons in the evenings and I don't sit in my apartment enough on the weekends to have a lot of time to code for fun. I'm looking for other avenues. What are other people working on? Is anyone using any of this stuff in anger? I'm actually quite interested to hear a bit more from Paul Dietz, as he is also a Motorola employee. What about jobs in the Chicago area that might involve Lisp? Personally, I don't have any idea what an agenda for the first Chicago Lisp meeting should look like but these are some of the general topics of interest to me. Actually, I live in Chicago (Wicker Park) but I work in Arlington Heights; I don't really often make it out to the suburbs on the weekends.

What about everybody else?

-- Damien Kick