I see, the questions are essentially jumping-off points to talk about various topics.
I particularly like the point about memory images. I was struggling to think about something Lisp-specific to say regarding huge codebases, especially since my Lisp code tends to be pretty compact. In fact, we were talking about SBCL's save-lisp-and-die functionality at the last meeting.
Certainly Lisp can interface to SQL databases, and that's a good topic to bring up. However, every language can do that, and I'm sure Andre (Erlang) will bring up Mnesia, their distributed database. That's a very strong point in favour of Erlang's ability to handle data. I wonder if the Lisp world has something similar, that integrates very tightly with Lisp.
I have not heard of this before, but it sounds quite powerful: http://common-lisp.net/project/elephant/
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 10:46 PM, Christopher Browne cbbrowne@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Dec 9, 2010 at 9:40 PM, Vish Singh vishvajitsingh@gmail.com wrote:
That is one unlikely montage :)
Yes, I agreed to do the panel. I've been to a couple of GTALUG meetings before and I think it will be a lot of fun, talking about Lisp and also learning about the other languages being presented. Also, it may draw more people into our club.
If anyone would like to provide suggestions for how to reply to the points above, they would be quite welcome. Most of them seem straightforward, but I don't know quite what I'd say about "large volumes of code" or "huge amounts of data".
Note that I'm the one to blame for virtually all of the questions! :-).
For "large code" I'd point at 4 Common Lisp answers, implementation dependent, but commonly available strategies: a) Tree shakers can shatter off unused code and construct loadable binaries. b) Bytecode compiled code is compact & quick to load c) Code compiled to machine code is less compact, but more heavily optimized d) Memory images can be dumped for fast reload (clisp -M, anyone?)
For "huge data" I suggest thinking about how you do equivalents to database access. There certainly are libraries allowing access to DBMSes and DBM-ish stuff. If there are other answers commonly used for serializing objects, that's good to comment on.
The questions were intended to be pretty open ended. Don't worry about perfect answers everywhere - there's not going to be time to explain every little detail, not with 7 people on the panel. Your share of the time isn't a LONG time.
Rather, having generally credible answers can encourage people to dig further.