Hello, hey, hi, greetings!
I am terribly sorry for posting the announcement for the next Online Lisp Meeting so late, since it will be in merely two days from now. I hope that most of you have already got slightly used to the bi-or-tri-weekly scheme of the Meetings and I am doubly sorry since I shall need to bend this one as well: I will announce two meetings, the eight, and the ninth, with just a week of delay between the two. (I will be unavailable during the rest of September, since life outside Lisp demands my attention.)
The 2^3th meeting will contain a re-stream of a talk by Andrew Sengul, who will be presenting April, a compiler from the APL language to Common Lisp. (The announcement for the 3^2th meeting will come in a separate mail.)
APL stands for Array Programming Language and, as the name suggests, is focused on working with arrays, making it great for for graphics, signal processing, statistical work and more.
Using APL within Lisp opens vast possibilities for working with structured data. Traditionally, APL is implemented in the form of a monolithic interpreter, and feeding data from databases and other external APIs into these interpreters and getting the results back in a usable format can be daunting.
April is different. Compiling APL expressions into Lisp means that any data that can be formatted as a number or character array in Lisp can be operated upon using APL. Often, dozens of lines of number-crunching code with many nested loops can be replaced by a single line of APL. If you're working on a Lisp application that involves many operations on arrays or uses complex algorithms in general, April can substantially speed up your development process.
In this talk Andrew will recount the trials of developing a new APL compiler from scratch and cover some of April's unique advantages, including macros that make it easy to extend and modify the language.
This presentation will also feature a sneak preview of Bloxl, a hardware startup powered by Common Lisp with April. Bloxl is producing a new luminous structural display technology; with Bloxl, you can build transparent glass walls that light up with software-controlled pixel graphics. You can see more on the Bloxl website at https://bloxl.co.
The original talk that will be restreamed will happen the day before (https://www.meetup.com/LispNYC/events/vqhmbpybcmblb/). In order to make the talk more accessible to European audiences (the original will start at midnight CEST!), I have offered to re-stream the whole talk with the ability to chat with the speaker on Twitch, which Andrew has accepted.
A short Jitsi talk with everyone will happen just after the meeting - everyone is invited! (I think it's better to organize those just after the meetings, because then they actually happen.)
Date/time/location:
Date: 9th September 2020 Time: 13:00 CEST - https://time.is/en/CEST Talk: https://www.twitch.tv/TwitchPlaysCommonLisp Hangout: https://chat.heisig.xyz/TwitchPlaysCommonLisp @ 14:30
Massive thanks to Marco Heisig for providing the Jitsi instance where we can hang out after the talk.
A mailing list has been created for the purpose of organizing and promoting the online talks. Further announcements will be posted there. See https://mailman.common-lisp.net/listinfo/online-lisp-meets
More videos welcome - please record and send me anything that you find interesting and is in any way related to Lisp.
BR and see you! Michał "phoe" Herda