More Amsterdam Lisp meeting stuff
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
I reported
the other day on the RDNZL presentation by Edi Weitz at the
Amsterdam Lisp meeting. His presentation was one of about a half dozen
presentations given. More detail from the
Amsterdam Lisp meeting, aka ILC2004-mini :-), is starting to come
in.
Dirk Gerrits emailed me some information on the presentation that
Nick Levine gave on
CLRFI:
"Anyway, I personally think the info in Nick Levine's short talk about the CLRFI is very much worth being more widely known in the Lisp community. (Has anyone announced it on comp.lang.lisp yet?)This approach is similar to the (relatively successful) Scheme SRFI approach. It allows for common extensions to be proposed, debated and approved/declined in the community without going through a formal standards process. Another advantage of this process is that vendors can explicitly support a particular RFI if there is a demand for it and not support other RFI's if there is no demand for the functionality. However, as Christophe Rhodes points out, in order for this to work, people need to get involved in creating high-quality RFI's. It remains to be seen whether this will happen.
Basically, the idea is to advance Common Lisp without actually having to develop a new ANSI standard. Everyone can write a CLRFI (Common Lisp Request For Implementation) and send it to the CLRFI editors. When it is approved, the CLRFI achieves draft status. It is then put on the website, announced on the clrfi-announce@alu.org mailing list, and it gets its own mailing list for discussion. After a discussion period, the CLRFI will either be withdrawn or become accepted. Accepted CLRFIs become a sort of 'de facto standard' additions to the HyperSpec, and will (hopefully) be widely implemented by Common Lisp vendors. The standard *features* mechanism can be used to check whether your implementation supports a certain CLRFI. All this info can be found in more detail at http://clrfi.alu.org."
Peter Van Eynde has made available his presentation and implementation code from his talk about "A Simple webserver using sbcl, araneida, pg and slime". The presentation deals with the (very real) "political" aspects of getting a CL-based web solution accepted in an enterprise. I enjoyed reading through it.
I have heard from Arthur Lemmens and Tayssir John Gabbour that they did make video and audio recordings of some of the Amsterdam presentations. They are in the process of cleaning them up a bit to remove noise and plan to make them available soon. It will be neat to see/hear them once they are available as it looked like a really neat meeting. On a related note, we also videoed the last Denver Area Lisp User Group meeting (held this past Monday, 9/27). I plan to put up a link to the video and the pdf files of the presentations soon.
