September 2008 - toronto-lisp - mailman3.common-lisp.net

[toronto-lisp] Horse play
by Brian Connoy 19 Sep '08

19 Sep '08

Hi all, I have reason to believe one of the VB/C# pilots here at work, is going to jump ship. As well, a supporting contractor is on his final day today. In short, they are likely to be in a pinch soon with their in-house VB/C# development efforts. So why am I mentioning this here?!? My aim (as mentioned at a couple of the meets) is to lay the ground-work of a "Lisp shop". They don't know it yet, but Common Lisp is going to be their secret weapon. Although I don't play a role in the developments mentioned, one way to broaden the Lisp base is the 'ole Trojan Horse ploy ... a Common Lisp programmer smuggled inside a .NET horse! Interested equestrians are welcome to contact me for more details. BC

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[toronto-lisp] Next meetup dates: September 18th, October 2nd
by Rudolf 14 Sep '08

14 Sep '08

Just a heads up. Next September meet up is the 18th. October meetup is just two weeks after because we have to shift back into 1st Thursday of the month mode. If you want to present in October, now's the time to say something. Paul T. if you're available for an October presentation on VF/event-driven programming that would be excellent. Or the other two topics that you mentioned here: http://common-lisp.net/pipermail/toronto-lisp/2008-August/000044.html Flip a coin or grab a 3-sided die (is that even possible?) to decide. You said some preparation time was necessary and hopefully this is enough. -Rudolf

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[toronto-lisp] Effecient I/O in SBCL
by Abram Hindle 03 Sep '08

03 Sep '08

I was running into problems with performance with SBCL. I want to read huge CSV files and convert ASCII representations of floats to floats. A. what's an effecient way to convert a string to a float B. what's an effecient way to read lines from a file C. what's an effecient way to split substrings from a string (I don't need to keep them around after I throw away the line) abram

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[toronto-lisp] September meetup and interesting projects
by Rudolf 03 Sep '08

03 Sep '08

== INTERESTING PROJECTS == Name some interesting projects you're working on! Zed Shaw posted a slightly interesting article about user groups, meetups, hackerspaces, social clubs, etc: http://www.zedshaw.com/rants/the_freehackers_union.html He says, I tried a few user groups, but there's barely anyone doing anything truly interesting. I really do enjoy the people who take the time to go to a user group for their favorite tech, but at the same time I feel like they're just there to escape their jobs. That's sad because I run into people who say, "(sigh) I have to do Rails", even at the Python groups. The Python group has had two months of meetings about fucking performance tuning. I love those guys, but holy baby jesus can we just move off of cython already? I hear reports that even the iPhone and Cocoa user group is lame. I mean, that group should be going ape shit right now. Projects...someone must be doing something interesting! Phd work, grad work, web work, desktop work, work work? Tell us more, maybe even present something :D Has anyone worked with Smalltalk or C#? What are they like compared to Common Lisp and Scheme? == NEXT MEETUP == Also, we need to decide the next meetup date. I'm thinking September 11th or 18th. They're all Thursdays of course, starting at 6pm, 99% chance of being at the LinuxCaffe. There's a fine Lisp meetup calendar here (in case you're in another city?): http://www.google.com/calendar/embed?src=pm55j8kg30dnm54ib2if9fuocc%40group… If Brian C. is still up for it, he could present at the next meetup, depending on if he's available for either of the days? -Rudolf

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