Eric Lavigne wrote:
"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.
Welcome to the team, Joel.
Yes welcome aboard. I'm sorry about my somewhat snide comment on your blog. My saturday just gets frustrated when people misrepresent my views. ;) But I have only myself to blame. As Eric has pointed out to me there are some things I can do to improve the Erlisp roadmap.
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. :-)
Okay, I had a different idea about quick and easy tasks. Personally, I don't consider anything related to Lisp concurrency easy, which is exactly why I've started this project. ;) But there are definately tasks that would result in just small amounts of code being added/changed.
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).
That's an excellent idea! I'll try to work that in as soon as possible. I'll also want to keep it as up to date as humanly possible, but take shouldn't take more than a few minutes a day.
- Dirk