Daniel Pezely wrote:
I'm looking into reserving a classroom at Seattle Central Community College, even though this group has no direct affiliation with any school.
If the goal is to get business people interested in Lisp, wouldn't an Eastside venue such as Bellevue Community College or Digipen be more appropriate? Or a business; it's actually best to avoid schools with students if you want business people. Anyways, on the Seattle side, between SCCC and U. Washington, mightn't the latter have more CS clout? I'm just having a very hard time seeing business people showing up at SCCC. Who does the WSA usually hit on for meeting space?
Topics: While there is LispBox, which does a good job of getting you started, my first presentation will be to move beyond the learning mode. Likewise, since installing a free common lisp system involves more than extracting a tar file or even knowing tweaky 'configure' options, the first session will probably be this: MacOSX + sbcl + Emacs + Slime with VirtualPC running FreeBSD (aka, fixing the reddit.com model).
Fine to see. One of the problems of Common Lisp is "gee how do you try this out for cheap on Windows?" Relevant in this town. I dumped the Bigloo Scheme-to-C compiler and started looking at Common Lisp to get into a bigger developer community, with more standards and possibly jobs. But on Windows, for games, dealing with C FFIs, and on a limited budget, there was no "common" in Common Lisp at all. Each implementation was a right unto its own. That's no better than the Scheme universe, so I moved on to the Chicken Scheme-to-C compiler. Somewhat less performance than Bigloo, somewhat larger community, better source license (BSD rather than GPL), has some C++ support, has SWIG support. I've made the right decision for the game industry, which is what I'm stalking, but I have no idea in any other development space. I'm clueless. I've been trying to get the Chicken MinGW build up to snuff for 9 months now. I'm almost done. Some brave souls have been trying to port SBCL to Win32. Judging from archives such as http://sbcl-internals.cliki.net/Win32 there's been real progress, but it's not ready for prime time. There is of course CLISP on the cheap and well supported side, but it's only an interpreter and that's not very exciting. Maybe there are some market segments where interpreter-only is fine, but I have a performance prejudice and tend to regard such things as toys. If anyone can demonstrate anything "significant" in CLISP I'd change my tune, particularly if there's money in it. Cheers, Brandon Van Every