"He" has already joined :-). I think I'll lurk around for a while and contribute to discussions. I'm in no position to code Erlisp at the moment. Feel free to bounce questions off of me, though.
Joel
Welcome to the team, Joel. I'm also keeping an eye on your uptick project. Looks interesting.
I do not think there /are/ any quick and easy tasks,
I think this is an issue worth looking into. New developers, especially if they are new to programming in general, need easy tasks to cut their teeth on. It would be nice if ErLisp could fill that need.
Each of my patches so far has some little problem with it. Allegro should be using gates rather than wait functions. That will require some reading and a few lines of code. CMUCL should probably use run-reasons instead of polling. That will require some research and a few lines of code. The bad news is that I'm a messy coder. :-( The good news is that there is no shortage of little projects laying around, and more are produced with each patch. :-)
What do you think of creating a contributor's page? It could have links to the download page and the discussion page (both of which are fine the way they are). It would also include a list of contribution ideas of various difficulties and suggestions for getting started on each (such as checking the CMUCL mailing list or CMUCL's multi-proc.lisp for the CMUCL run-reasons task).
Eric