Back from the UK
Friday, March 18, 2005
Well, I arrived back on Tuesday night after 3 weeks of
contract work in the UK. I had some minor surgery done on Wednesday
morning to remove some Basal
Cell cancer on my head (nothing serious, but I look a bit like Frankenstein at the
moment!), so I've been just hanging out for the past couple of
days. I start doing some remote contract work from home from next week.
I had a good time while I was in England and got to do
most of the Lisp-related things I had planned. Unfortunately, a
combination of things (work and weather related) meant that I didn't get to go to Amsterdam to
meet up with Arthur Lemmens, Edi Weitz, Jans Aasman, Pascal Costanza
and Tayssir John Gabbour. :-( However, I did attend the
UK Lispers/Schemers meeting and I did get together with a number
of Lispers in London on March 5 for dinner and beers.
The UK
Lispers/Schemers meeting was very well organized and held at the
offices of
LShift, a very interesting "pure technology" company. John Kozak
gave a presentation on using Scheme to test a device driver for
hardware that doesn't exist yet (see
PDF) . I got a bit nervous attending the UK Lispers/Schemers meeting as both
Daniel Barlow and Christophe Rhodes attended that meeting. If a fire
had broken out or an asteroid had hit the building, we would have
lost two of the top SBCL developers! ;-) We
adjourned after the meeting to a nearby pub for a few drinks and I
just barely managed to catch the last train from London to High Wycombe
(where I was staying/working).
The March 5 dinner/drinks was really neat too. Unfortunately,
Matt
Jadud wasn't able to make it due to heavy snow in the South-East of
England; however, we had a range of Lisp implementors there:
- Patrick Collison came over from Ireland to show us Croma, the version of Lisp that he's been writing. Croma has got a lot of neat features in it and it reminded me a lot of the feature-set that Paul Graham is planning to implement in Arc.
- Daniel Barlow, one of the implementors of SBCL (as well as a lot of other packages like Araneida and CLiki) was there as well as having come to the earlier UK Lispers/Schemers meet.
- Donald Fisk also came to both the UK Lispers/Schemers meet and the March 5 dinner. He has written his own dialect of Lisp called Emblem.
- Matthias Radestock, one of the implementors of SISC, a Scheme implementation in Java, was at the dinner too.
It was really neat to be able to meet so many Lispers while I was in the UK. Thank you to everyone who came out to these meetings - it was really enjoyable for me.
