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.