seattle June 2006

seattle@common-lisp.net

11 participants
26 discussions

[LispSea] instruction then presentation
by Daniel J Pezely 05 Jul '06

05 Jul '06

Stating the obvious, what's needed right now is instruction. So, let's start at the beginning of shaping Seattle as a Lisp town-- shall we? After all, the more people who know Lisp locally, the better chances we all have for getting paying work doing Lisp since having a pool of talent is a requirement for most business. For the consultant's perspective (where businesses don't care what language it is, so long as the work-for-hire does what they need it to do), I would like to deploy a Lisp-based system knowing that there are others whom can continue the on-going operations. Anyone interested in teaching Lisp? Anyone have formal experience as an instructor? I believe Lisp is more about the approach than syntax or API, and that's saying a lot, considering how the "core" Common Lisp library is massive compared to the usual suspects. What's needed is a demonstration of code maturing from blank canvas to just-get-something-working to various directions of "what if?" before settling on what's right for the task at hand. We could structure our sessions with the first 30 minutes for instruction and the next hour or so as deeper presentation, show & tell, etc. Comments? -Daniel

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[LispSea] creating a Lisp seminar in Seattle
by Daniel J Pezely 30 Jun '06

30 Jun '06

While our list was unavailable, I exchanged email and telephone calls with a few people... First, a quick summary of LispSea: Programmers here want training, and software development managers need answers to the usual questions about minimizing risk, where to find future employees, etc. Our charter: "promote, nurture & expand Lisp in Seattle" Monthly presentations can be useful, but what's really needed: Create a 1-2 day seminar with programmer versus business tracks. One and a half days would be ideal, similar in format to other local events that you might be familiar with, such as the Microsoft Meltdown where they cater to local game developers. It would offer various levels of training, much like an interactive version of the available Lisp movies as well as a crash-course for those finding that merely possessing a book or .mov isn't enough. Also address deeper topics: forums on porting/portability of your code, optimization, mixed language interop, etc but from the perspective of programmers at bottom of the food chain. No, this isn't to replace the International Lisp Meetings. Each serves a different purpose, a different crowd. This is more for the cross-over programmer and dev managers who want to be on the leading edge. Yes, it's a lot of work. I've helped with producing niche events at SIGGRAPH, NAB and others as well as having been the token programmer in an expo booth at various trade shows. So... I have a good idea of what I'm getting myself into here. I'm not so much asking whether you /like/ the idea or not... Some believe that seminars are a waste of time, and if you're one, this isn't for you. I'm asking those who would consider attending such a thing: What would you like to see at such an event? -Daniel

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[LispSea] mailing list is working again
by Daniel J Pezely 29 Jun '06

29 Jun '06

Our mailing list is working again, but please allow another day or so for DNS caches to settle if your messages bounce. As mentioned on yesterday on http://planet.lisp.org, our mailing list provider was having domain transfer problems. I'll update the wiki page again. -Daniel PS - I'm sure everyone had been trying to send constructive comments on how to facilitate teaching Lisp in Seattle, so please re-submit your posting. Thanks!

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[LispSea] topics for presentation?
by Daniel J Pezely 23 Jun '06

23 Jun '06

What would you like to learn about or explore as a session topic? Based upon conversations and exchanges outside the mailing list, some have mentioned an interest in a demonstration of getting all the tweaky bits arranged for a complete development system beyond what LispBox offers. (See http://gigamonkeys.com/lispbox/) Because this is more involved than simply extracting a compressed tar file, it might become an hour long tutorial. Topic: How to set-up and stay current with cvs/svn/darcs repositories for Emacs, Slime, your lisp engine du jour, with common add-ons like asdf, asdf-install and libraries omitted from the standard spec such as split-sequence. Other topics? -Daniel

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Re: [LispSea] presentation requests
by Brandon J. Van Every 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

Jeff Wood wrote: > My response would be to look @ the game developer article on Naughty > Dog ( a game production company that was purchased by Sony ... if I'm > remembering correctly ) ... they used a LOT of lisp in their internal > stuff ... made for some great games ... made them good enough they got > bought ... and of course, then their technology was too much and got > killed by the parent company ... > I'm quite aware of Naughty Dog. It's not really that interesting to me as a presentation though, unless someone has a way of obtaining someone from Naughty Dog that did the GOAL code. Dog and pony of open source Lisp games is potentially more interesting because people can download and play with it. Granted there aren't any great Lisp games out there. Stratagus was previously one of the better ones; it began life as Freecraft, a Warcraft clone. But in the transition to Stratagus, the new hands on board dumped the Scheme interpreter. See, this is a pattern. I'm not eager to do any kind of presentation about Naughty Dog unless there's a principal to give it. Any secondhand presentation ends with "Well, uh, and they dumped Lisp in favor of the same old crud." Depressing. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp > > ... I agree it's not something that everybody can play with right now > ... but it does show that people are doing *something* with it ... > and are willing to invest in good ideas ... What it proves, is that if you're making an expensive mainstream title, you can pay someone to sit around and invent their own programming language. Then it'll turn out that that guy had fun making his career at the partial expense of the product he was working on. The subsequent team that comes in, has no investment in the newfangled code and dumps it. It is a very bad model for sustainable Lisp development. Hmm, yet more reason to stick to my guns about developing a 3D Scheme engine from scratch. If the core technology is not Scheme, if it is just an embedded language, then the embedded language will be replaced by whatever else becomes au courrant. Even if Scheme is really easy to embed, and makes headway on new projects in that manner, I think without a "major anchor" it just drifts away into the ocean of scripting languages. Cheers, Brandon Van Every

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Fwd: [LispSea] presentation requests
by Jeff Wood 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jeff Wood <jeff.darklight(a)gmail.com> Date: Jun 21, 2006 4:41 PM Subject: Re: [LispSea] presentation requests To: "Brandon J. Van Every" <bvanevery(a)gmail.com> My response would be to look @ the game developer article on Naughty Dog ( a game production company that was purchased by Sony ... if I'm remembering correctly ) ... they used a LOT of lisp in their internal stuff ... made for some great games ... made them good enough they got bought ... and of course, then their technology was too much and got killed by the parent company ... Anyways, it's still very informative. Here's what I found quickly on the topic: http://www.answers.com/topic/naughty-dog http://www.franz.com/success/customer_apps/animation_graphics/naughtydog.lh… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naughty_Dog http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp http://www.gamasutra.com/features/20020710/white_01.htm ... I agree it's not something that everybody can play with right now ... but it does show that people are doing *something* with it ... and are willing to invest in good ideas ... --jw. On 6/21/06, Brandon J. Van Every <bvanevery(a)gmail.com> wrote: > theo nolastname wrote: > > Shat are the up/down sides > > to the various implementations? > > Was that a Freudian slip? :-) > > I was quiet because I finally went to Yakima to gather signatures. Back > in Seattle for 1 day, hitting the road again tomorrow. I've got a dog! > Picked up a stray at the Yakima Walmart. I may be going down to Oregon > after this, so this could put my 3D demo plans behind. > > I'd like to see a presentation of SBCL running on Windows. > > I'd like to see system / shell scripting for the Windows user. It is > very common for Unix people to script this, script that, but culturally > I have little sense of it as a Windows non-networked desktop user. Are > there things a scripting mentality could do for me at a systems level > that I just am not thinking about? > > I'd like to see a semi-decent game using Lisp or Scheme somehow. There > are a small number of open source ones out there, but I was never > excited enough about any of 'em as far as code reuse to really dig > through them. It would be amusing to put someone else up to a dog and > pony show. Myself, I'm concentrating on my own code right now, to the > extent I have time. It'll be awhile before my own dog and pony shows > are ready. > > I'd like to see applications of Lisp in image processing, 3D graphics, > and scientific visualization. > > I'd like to see someone demonstrate a robot. > > I've been intermittently interested in the Festival speech synthesis > system. http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/ I've seen almost > no updating of their homepage over the past year though, which gave me > little confidence in using their technology commercially for games. > Festival uses a Scheme command interpreter. > > I'd like to see an Artificial Life demo. > > > > > 3. Information about the different dialects of lisp. > > Advantages of scheme vs. common lisp vs. emacs lisp > > vs. arc (whenever it comes out) vs. > > what-ever-else-is-out-there. Right now, I am leaning > > somewhat towards common lisp as the first lisp that I > > seriously want to start playing around with. I really > > don't know anyone who does active lisp development, > > though, so it would be nice to actually talk to > > someone and find out some of the trade-offs > > language-wise between the various lisps. > > > > I certainly know a lot about this from a Windows game developer's > standpoint. I chose Chicken Scheme because (1) it's a Scheme-to-C > compiler and I'm into performance, (2) it has an excellent C FFI and > that's important to the performance oriented things I want to do, (3) it > has some C++ capabilities although I'm not sure how far one can actually > go with them, (4) every C FFI out there is different for every > implementation, whether it's "Common" Lisp or not. So there's no > advantage to CL in this case. You live or die by your implementation. > > > 4. performance analysis. How fast is lisp compared to > > xxx language? How easy is it to embed/link c/assembly > > functions to lisp code? What are some techniques for > > making lisp run faster? A short tutorial on some of > > the more popular profilers avaliable might be good as > > well. > > > > The Shootout statistics are that every single natively compiled language > out there is in the same rough order of magnitude of performance. I > don't just mean Lisp and Scheme, I mean others like OCaml, Clean, > Haskell, Mercury, etc. All the various scripted interpreters and byte > compilers are in a different rough order of magnitude of performance, > and it's significantly lower than the compiled languages. If you want > performance, get any natively compiled language and be happy. After > getting that baseline you should be picking in terms of support, > usability, user community, price, open source if that's important to > you, license, etc. An advantage of an open source license is if you > want to improve the performance, you can, if you're willing to do the work. > > > Cheers, > Brandon Van Every > _______________________________________________ > seattle mailing list > seattle(a)common-lisp.net > http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/seattle >

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[LispSea] presentation requests
by theo nolastname 22 Jun '06

22 Jun '06

Hi! My name is Theo. I am totally new to actually programming common lisp. My interest in lisp was sparked by reading various peoples' blogs about this successes with lisp (and various other high-level programming langauges, usually functional in nature). I'm not really sure what kind of stuff people are intersted in presenting, but I don't really know much right now, and so would be pretty much interested in anything presented. 1. Some ideas, however, are projects that people are currently hacking on. It's always interesting to look at the actual practical considerations and effects that lisp adds to a development project. 2. Information about the different lisp implementations out there. Shat are the up/down sides to the various implementations? Is going with a commercial implementation worth it in the general case? 3. Information about the different dialects of lisp. Advantages of scheme vs. common lisp vs. emacs lisp vs. arc (whenever it comes out) vs. what-ever-else-is-out-there. Right now, I am leaning somewhat towards common lisp as the first lisp that I seriously want to start playing around with. I really don't know anyone who does active lisp development, though, so it would be nice to actually talk to someone and find out some of the trade-offs language-wise between the various lisps. 4. performance analysis. How fast is lisp compared to xxx language? How easy is it to embed/link c/assembly functions to lisp code? What are some techniques for making lisp run faster? A short tutorial on some of the more popular profilers avaliable might be good as well. Just some thoughts. As I said before, I know pretty much nothing, but I am very eager to learn/participate as much as I can. Theo Nordsieck PS. I will be going to BCC as a full time student for the next 3+ quarters. I might be able to talk to someone and get us a free meeting area (college auditorium style, tiered seeting, lots of power, access to a projector w/ 3 screens). Not saying that I will be able to do anything, but there are several other organizations that use the area. Is there an interest in me trying to make something like that happen? I know that it's on the eastside, so that might be an issue for people. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com

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[LispSea] status of planning the first meeting
by Daniel J Pezely 18 Jun '06

18 Jun '06

Our first meeting will be in mid-to-late July. Details on the legwork: A big part of this group is to meet and have some element of an interactive session such as a demonstration or live tutorial. My first pick for location was a classroom at Seattle Central Community College. Some rooms are equipped with video projectors, and these may be reserved-- ordinarily. Currently, however, SCCC is deep into rather massive renovations, so this may not work until autumn. My second pick was a meeting room at the Capitol Hill branch of the Seattle Public Library (which was rebuilt a couple of years ago and is rather nice). For this location, however, we must provide our own projector. Unless someone has a projector, I'll arrange to get one. Suggestions for alternate locations are welcome. Drawing upon prior experiences, these types of events seem to draw a slightly larger crowd when there's free food (such as pizza) and zero cost to attend. I'm working on all these factors, so that's what's taking time. Once we get the first couple of meetings behind us, subsequent sessions will happen more gracefully. As there's a national holiday in early July and many people take vacations around then, the meeting would be best towards the latter part of the month. While I realize that puts it a month out, it's actually not that far away. That's the update. Thanks for your patience, and thanks for participating! -Daniel PS - I'll send a separate call for planning the exact day as that time approaches.

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[LispSea] video projector?
by Daniel J Pezely 15 Jun '06

15 Jun '06

Does anyone have a video projector that we may use for the first few meetings? Likewise, does anyone have advice on projectors? Some perform resolution scaling such as squashing large screens down to 1024x786. While that's fine for most people's business slide shows, is this adequate for viewing text such as within Emacs and a web browser? Thanks, -Daniel

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[LispSea] the Gardeners
by Brandon J. Van Every 15 Jun '06

15 Jun '06

yes I'm dragging my feet about getting out the door to Yakima. Tomorrow, I swear. Maybe even early for a change. I've unsubscribed from the Gardeners mailing list. Reasons: - Many of the posts aren't following their charter. A lot of things people propose aren't "weed pulling" or "maintenance" projects. They're heavy duty build-a-lot-of-stuff efforts. At least, this is my perception skimming the proposals floating into my inbox. Too many "from scratch" projects. As a person with plenty of my own projects, who could generate projects for LispSea until the cows come home, it's a turnoff. When people post a lot of "from scratch" projects that they haven't even started yet, I have a hard time taking them seriously. I assume, based on 14 years of internet experience with such things, that they won't get anything done and won't make good work partners. - Other posts are following the charter, i.e. meaningful usability and showcasing improvements to things already extant. But they happen to be projects I'm not interested in. Generally, I am already doing the projects I'm interested in. I may be exceptional in that I've scoured the Earth for projects that meet my own goals and aspirations. Nothing's out there that does what I want, I've bazillion-checked it. So I'm doing the things I want. I'll worry about dragging other people into my projects as they get farther underway. I realize not everyone's in my shoes. People may show up to LispSea with an amiable disposition, have energy to do projects, and happily slot themselves into whatever the Gardeners are up to. But for Windows game development in high level languages, there's nothing out there at all. - The focus is Common Lisp and I'm a Chicken Schemer. I'm happy to work with the CL crowd on open source Windows and OpenGL issues. But it's never going to get the bulk of my attention, not unless there's $$$$$ in it somewhere. I've chosen my toolset and made my sweat investments. I'm determined to make Chicken Scheme the best game development enviornment on any platform. For game developers whose brains work a certain way, of course. - LispSea projects are way more important to me than Gardeners projects. If two birds can be killed with one stone that's great, but I'm far more confident in local partnerships and efforts, should the stars align. "How will it improve the Lisp job market in Seattle?" is the first thing on my mind for any LispSea project. My takeaway is, I believe strongly in people networking their personal interests. I'd like to put tools in front of people, and enact the needed communication rituals, so that it happens. I see that as the LispSea priority, organizing and networking people on the local level. I don't see "doing whatever the Gardeners are doing" as a priority. It's an available venue for partnerships, but partnerships can come from other quarters as well. Mostly, I'd like to see us concentrate on *local* partnerships. Things where face-to-face is a decided value add for getting things done. Cheers, Brandon Van Every

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seattle June 2006