Clementson's Blog

Lisp User Group Meeting Summaries

Monday, November 29, 2004

Had an interesting discussion with Mikel Evins and Michael Maynard (a friend of Mikel whom he was staying with over the holidays) at the Denver Area Lisp User Group meeting on Sunday. Unfortunately, due to the inclement weather, Thanksgiving holiday, and shortness of notice (Mikel and I only arranged the meeting the day before!), there were only two of us DALUG "regulars" at the meeting. Topics included:

• Brief history of Apple's Advanced Technology Group (ATG), a group responsible for a lot of interesting projects/research inside Apple. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he shut the group down (talk to Mikel sometime for his take on the reasons). A lot of innovative software work (MCL, Newton, Dylan) was worked on by the ATG, so it was sad to hear the story of it's demise. Alexander Repenning (creator of the Lisp product AgentSheets) also used to work for the ATG. He, unfortunately, was not able to make it to the meeting due to conflicts.
• Embedded Lisp OS's - Michael does a lot of embedded work and is starting to get interested in the idea of embedded Lisps. Mikel was giving him a hand over the holidays in setting up a working CL setup so that he can start experimenting with the language.
• SK8 - Mikel is coordinating work on the "revival" of SK8. Incidentally, he posted today about progress on SK8 in his weblog, including the following screenshot of a simple SK8 application (to be used as a canonical example that can be expanded on by SK8 porters/developers):
  
  
• Building OpenMCL on OS X - this is a sometimes difficult task and Mikel had some pointers on how to do it.
• General Lisp chatter. ;-)