toronto-lisp October 2009

toronto-lisp@common-lisp.net

9 participants
10 discussions

[toronto-lisp] Next meetup, Tuesday November 3rd?
by Rudolf Olah 03 Nov '09

03 Nov '09

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Hey, so is the next meet up next week on tuesday? is anyone going to present something? - -rudolf -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux) Comment: Using GnuPG with Mozilla - http://enigmail.mozdev.org/ iEYEARECAAYFAkrnYywACgkQcHIYWoXobHjVBQCg3/3hH88EVM2adKeK99NoCGlb LAoAn30cV13SpAvvqa/TQzMoVhx2SqQJ =m308 -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----

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[toronto-lisp] More Sexprs versus XML links
by Abram Hindle 02 Nov '09

02 Nov '09

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/10/30/xml-or-s-expressions/ and http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?XmlIsaPoorCopyOfEssExpressions More on S-expres http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?EssExpressions abram

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[toronto-lisp] Antiweb available on github
by doug＠hcsw.org 25 Oct '09

25 Oct '09

We just pushed our git repository to github: http://github.com/hoytech/antiweb Official releases will still be tarballed and archived on the antiweb website: http://hoytech.com/antiweb/ Doug

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[toronto-lisp] New recruit
by Brian Connoy 24 Oct '09

24 Oct '09

FYI ... we just might have a new recruit at the next meetup. Yesterday, while seated on the bus with my nose buried (as usual) in a Lisp book, a young woman seated to my left asked excitedly "Is that Scheme!?" It was indeed; the fourth edition of "The Scheme Programming Language". Her name is Laura.

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[toronto-lisp] Smalltalk TV and Toronto Smalltalk Group
by Rudolf Olah 20 Oct '09

20 Oct '09

Apparently the Toronto Smalltalk Group has put together something called Smalltalk TV. I just spotted the article in Dr Dobb's Journal http://www.ddj.com/architect/220100617 And the website itself: http://www.smalltalktelevision.com/

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[toronto-lisp] Interesting video of a new visual programming tool
by Vishvajit Singh 18 Oct '09

18 Oct '09

Hello, Today I watched this interesting video created by a researcher at MIT CSAIL. It describes a new programming language and environment called "Subtext": http://subtextual.org/subtext2.html It appears to be a sort of Lisp structure editor, mixed with the idea of pattern-matching on the arguments using truth tables. You have to watch until near the end to see a really complex application of the tool. He develops a function that determines the "attack damage" in a role-playing game, and it's really nice the way you can literally see how the data flows through your program. I really wanted to get my hands on it, so I downloaded the ZIP file on his website (http://subtextual.org/subtext2.zip), but it appears to be a Windows app so I'm not able to play with it right now. It's interesting to see that even 50 years after Lisp was invented, people are still trying to figure out how to get visual programming right. It seems that there are still many possibilities to be explored in this space. Vish

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[toronto-lisp] SGML, Scheme and a historical anecdote
by David Penton 10 Oct '09

10 Oct '09

This is a reminiscence that may be a bit over-long. You may wish to spend your time wisely and just skip reading it ;-) At the Oct. 6 meeting I made a vague reference to having heard about Scheme for the first time in connection with SGML. I was not altogether sure that my memory was correct, but a quick check in wikipedia confirms the connection. The sgml stylesheet language DSSSL is said to be "based on a subset of Scheme." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DSSSL ) Moreover, its connection with my own history now reminds me that, like Brian Connoy, I too missed an earlier chance to dive into learning lisp/lisp-like languages. This is where I first heard about Scheme. In the early 2000's I was heavily involved in a project whose main objective was to put Canadian federal legislation online. XML was the big deal back then, so we planned to use it to mark up, store, print and search Canadian statutes and regulations. One of the biggest problems encountered was how to print legislation marked up as XML. The legacy system used legislation created in WordPerfect, which was then converted to the input format of custom implementation of one of the phototypesetting engines of the day (I forget which one.) The legacy printing system was becoming unsupportable due to its age, the large quantity of cruft in the code and the gradual disappearance (through death, insanity etc.) of most people who knew how to use it. The jackass whose responsibility it was to replace the legacy printing system had absolutely no clue about XML. He had spent years at the Canada Gazette, and had done everything in MS Word plus a bunch of crap he had kluged up in VB or some other horror. He absolutely could NOT grasp the idea of hierarchical data structures, trees etc. When I tried to explain recursion and tree structures to him he just lost his temper. The project bogged down almost to the point of cancellation over this issue. The House of Commons techical staff were in a total panic. I "tactfully" informed the project manager that the guy in charge of printing was a total fucking idiot. Eventually I began investigating methods of printing XML and SGML on my own. I discovered Jade (a DSSSL engine) and also JadeTex. I had used TeX heavily for some time, so I proposed that we go that direction. As it turned out, DSSSL was in fairly bad repute with a lot of people who had considerable influence on the project. This was almost entirely because (to paraphrase these people) "DSSSL = Scheme and Scheme is *weird* and NOBODY uses Scheme for anything useful." This same bunch also had a lot of prejudice against TeX. The desktop publishing, or rather word processing paradigm ruled supreme in their world. And anyway, in the structured markup world at the time many people thought that SGML was too complex, and hence so was anything related to it. (That's why we have XML, I guess.) (For a contrary view check out some of the recently deceased Erik Naggum's rants about XML.) At that point I began to investigate XSLT and XSL-FO. XSLT engines were reasonably advanced at the time (XSLT 1.0 I think). XSL-FO was pretty new. Only a rather half-baked open source version (FOP, an apache project) was readily available. Hardly anyone was all that worried about printing out XML, because the focus was all on its use for web site content, or SOAP, and that kind of stuff. So transforming XML to HTML and styling with CSS was about all anyone seemed to care about. So, one April easter weekend I worked for four days straight (with about two hours of sleep per day) to do a 'proof of concept' print engine. I bashed together something using the project's XML for legislation and XSLT outputting to XSL-FO. This worked fairly well. It also gave me a quick introductory lesson in (more or less) functional style, or at least without being able to rely on side-effects. As it all turned out, I had so offended the people in charge of the print engine project that they persuaded management to (a) take my proof of concept stuff (b)hire consultants to produce a production-quality system based on it (c) acquire a commercial XSL-FO engine (Antenna House), and (d) banish me to some remote part of the project for having insulted the dimwit whose job I had largely done. I became the official project pariah for a time. So much for being technically right, but tactlessly, vociferously, and impolitically so. It would not surprise me to find out that the almost-functional nature of XSLT is based on the same rationale for basing DSSSL on Scheme. I have read some explanations of the advantages the designers thought might result from making XSLT side-effectless, but I did not understand them at the time. Perhaps learning Scheme some day might clarify the matter for me. I seems that the prevailing prejudice against DSSSL and Scheme caused me to miss my chance to dive into the lisp/scheme world seven or eight years ago. - Dave -

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[toronto-lisp] OpenMCL / Clozure CL
by David Penton 10 Oct '09

10 Oct '09

Does anyone use openmcl / ccl? I am looking for some hints on debugging.

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[toronto-lisp] meeting Tuesday Oct. 6
by Paul Tarvydas 07 Oct '09

07 Oct '09

Are we meeting tomorrow (Oct. 6)? pt

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[toronto-lisp] Scheme to be split into two languages
by Brian Connoy 02 Oct '09

02 Oct '09

Some links about the future of Scheme that may be of interest: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3582 http://scheme-reports.org/2009/position-statement.html http://scheme-reports.org/2009/working-group-1-charter.html http://scheme-reports.org/2009/working-group-2-charter.html

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toronto-lisp October 2009