Vancouver Lisping
Friday, April 15, 2005
I was up in Vancouver last weekend and arrived back home Monday night to a backlog
of things I had to do, so am only just slowly catching up with things
now! Hence the lack of recent posts.
I had a few beers with
Drew Crampsie and his girlfriend Laura while I was up
in Vancouver. Drew is doing most of his new contract work in Lisp and
it was interesting to hear the approach he takes when presenting
Lisp to clients. Since CL is a very stable language, he has been able
to offer clients long-term code support for much cheaper prices than
the equivalent in Perl or PHP. Apparently, this
usually resonates well
with clients and has been a strong selling point when presenting Lisp
as a cost-effective alternative.
Drew
recently started hosting
a new wiki to replace the
ALU CLiki site after Daniel Barlow
announced that the current ALU CLiki site would be going
away soon due to hosting issues. Given the tremendous amount of
material on the ALU CLiki site, this is a tremendous service that Drew is providing for the Lisp
community. He has started adding new content to
the site including a page on
Web Programming and another one on the use of
continuations in web programming. Drew also organized the
January 2005
Software Devleopers meeting in Vancouver at which
Professor Gregor Kiczales (known in Lisp circles for the work he
did on the
MetaObject Protocol) gave a presentation. Interestingly, Gregor
Kiczales is also a Vancouverite (he teaches at
UBC).
I met a number of interesting Lispers when I was up in
Toronto last year
too - it seems that Canada is a good breeding ground for innovative Lispers!
