Meeting, Main Topic – Common Lisp

I had a great time at the first Indiana State University Programming Meetup! This meeting went very well and it actually went much better than I expected.

When I first arrived on campus, the first task was to find a parking spot. I just parked in the student lot where I used to park years ago while attending ISU. (I won’t say how many years. ) While I was walking to Root Hall, I noticed Tim Ritchey and Tim Jasko walking right in front of me. If it were not for their pictures on the bitfauna web site, I would have never known. Tim Ritchey was on the phone, so I chatted with Jasko on the way in.

It had been about 17 years since I had been in the Unix Lab at Root Hall, so I could not remember where it was once we walked inside the building. I had to swallow my pride and finally ask someone. When we walked in, my long time friend, Steve Baker informed us that the pizza was on it’s way. I want to thank Steve for helping me set this meeting up and paying for the pizza! It was very nice of him to help with everything.

There were nine people that showed up for the meeting. A guy named Brad came all the way from Purdue to attend. He heard about the meeting by reading it on Planet Lisp. There was a student there from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology that was just starting a class project that involved using Common Lisp. I had e-mailed his professor about the meeting and he passed it along. That was pretty cool.

So after I kicked off the meeting, Tim Ritchey and Tim Jasko took over. They began by taking us through a presentation of their desktop management system Paragent. To create Paragent they used the Common Lisp web framework Uncommon Web or UCW. They used a mySQL database for the backend. They also used the graphics library, CL-Vectors for a lot of their interface, which was awesome! Tim Ritchey then ssh’ed into their server to show us Common Lisp running and how they can easily add to the application, compile and make it live quickly. They were using SBCL for their Common Lisp implementation.

After the discussion on Paragent, Tim Jasko showed us his Common Lisp plugin for Eclipse known as CUSP. He took us through autocompletion, macro expansion and quick access to the Hyperspec, just to name a few. I highly recommend CUSP for Common Lisp development. I have started using it and I really like it. CUSP is a great way to get started using Common Lisp, especially if you are a beginner. It is much quicker than setting up Emacs/SLIME. CUSP also uses SBCL as the Common Lisp implementation, which is great!

There were many questions for Tim and Tim afterwards. Everyone seemed to enjoy the demo. I want to thank Tim and Tim for coming, they did a really good job of presenting. Who knows, we may even have gained a couple new Lispers after a presentation like that. It really helped to observe how veteran Lispers wrote their code. It helped me confirm I was doing things right as well as showed me some things I didn’t know.

Afterwards I had a chance to chat with both Tim’s. We talked about Paragent and CUSP. Plus we talked about how nice it would be to have about a half day seminar/meetup of Lisp users in Indianapolis. I hope we can put something like this together. We would like this to be a large gathering if possible.

Steve and I will be discussing what is on the schedule for the next meeting. We hope to do this Indiana State University Meetup every month. I need to discuss this more with Steve and figure out what we want to do. It turned out to be a great start with a lot of Lisp goodness!

Programming Meetup Tonight!

In my quest to start a Common Lisp users group locally, a friend and I started a general programming group that will include all languages including Common Lisp. Our first meeting will be tonight at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana. We are meeting in Root Hall at 5:30pm EST in the Unix Lab. The public is welcome!

Veteran Lispers Tim Ritchey and Tim Jasko will be showing us a demo of their Common Lisp plugin CUSP and their desktop management system, Paragent.

I’ll write another blog post to tell you how things went at the meeting tonight.

Lispy Projects

I have continued to study Common Lisp since the last time I posted. I was having some difficulty with using Let, but worked it out the other night. I was initializing variables and expecting their value to be available outside of the Let statement. This is not possible the way I was doing it. So after experimenting, I was able to figure it out.

I wrote some small programs to convert kilometers to meters and celsius to fahrenheit. They were quick to write and worked well. I am now investigating some kind of project to work on. The Common Lisp community did have a great idea when they created CL Gardeners, but it is now dead in the water. The web site is still up and you can still subscribe to the mailing list, but there is no activity. I e-mailed one of the people responsible for CL Gardeners, Peter Siebel. If that name sounds familiar, he is the author of the very popular book on Common Lisp named Practical Common Lisp. He confirmed that CL Gardeners was very silent these days.

So I’m back to the drawing board, trying to come up with an interesting project that I can write in Common Lisp. I did checkout Climacs. This is an Emacs style editor written in Common Lisp. This is a very interesting project, but I’m not good enough to contribute to this project at this time.

Speaking of Lisp projects, I tried to gather some interest locally in my small city to create a Common Lisp user group of some kind. I thought I may have a chance, since we have two local colleges in this town. But sadly, there wasn’t much interest. I didn’t go as far as posting a bulletin or anything, I just sent out some e-mails to local professors. It’s too bad really, because it would have been cool to talk Lisp with some people in person. Oh well, thats how it goes.

Of course I’ll keep you posted on what I end up doing in Common Lisp.