Or maybe, to be frank, perhaps not a lisp question at all. So delete this if you are busy.
However...from the two meetings of the Toronto lisp group I have attended, I gather that several of you do web development, or related stuff. So some of you are probably knowledgeable in areas that are a mystery to me.
I made it CASCON today and enjoyed the session on "Practical Ontology Infrastructure". Of course, this topic has plenty of connections to things that may interest the lisp community. But that topic is not the source of my questions, or rather my bafflement.
Over the past ten years I have often been utterly flummoxed and not a little annoyed when I try to grasp what is going on in the "business world" of computing. At CASCON this week many of the sessions were about SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). The notion of SOA came to my attention some time ago, but although I looked it up on wikipedia and even read some commercial blurbs on it, I still have no damned idea what they are talking about. I enjoy learning things that seem like "computer science." But I cannot for the life of me penetrate this combined computing and business stuff.
From my limited, jaded, and admittedly dated perspective, it seems we are subjected to a never-ending succession of questionable panaceas, cooked up - maybe - by marketing people. The ones that are about computing over the internet seem particularly offensively squishy to me.
Would anybody be willing to fill me in, perhaps not on the mailing list if it is too off-topic? LIke, as I struggle to learn lisp and such, should I really pay attention to "software as a service", "service oriented architecture", and so on ad infinitum?
Or should I just grow old and die of gum disease and varicose veins. F**k.
- Dave -