Summmary of lispvan July 2005 meeting
Saturday, July 23, 2005
Well, we had quite a good turnout and an excellent start for our first meeting of "lispvan", the Vancouver Lisp Users Group. There were 8 attendees with another 2 who would have liked to have come but had other commitments. The attendees were:
- Bill Clementson: me! :-)
- Drew Crampsie: who gave the presentation on Lisp-on-Lines and uses CL on a daily basis to create web applications for clients of the tech coop
- Elliot Johnson: a Fresno California CLIM hacker who came up for the meeting (actually, he has a brother up here whom he was visiting as well!) - he is studying CS and working (unfortunately, mostly in PHP)
- Dean Giberson: who is experimenting with Lisp/Scheme and hopes to use it one day in his work at Electronic Arts
- Kevin Griffin: a consultant who is currently looking at CL-PDF and CL-TYPESETTING for creating custom documentation
- James Wright: who works for Business Objects (interesting, because I used to deal with them when I was working for PeopleSoft, but that was before James joined the company) but who couldn't tell me what he was working on because he would have to kill me if he did!
- Pietro Campesato: who is exploring Lisp/Scheme and has some interesting ideas about using Lisp in education
- Andrew Catton: who (with Avi Bryant) has a company that develops/supports Seaside (a continuation-based web application framework that is written in Smalltalk)
I have had an interest in continuation-based web application frameworks for a while and have commented about Seaside in the past (see here, here, here, here, here, here), so it was neat to have Andrew Catton at our meeting too. I had previously exchanged a couple of emails with Avi Bryant (who developed Seaside) and had arranged to have a beer with him in August when he gets back from Europe. However, we have now tentatively agreed with Andrew (after a few beers) that Avi and Andrew will give our August lispvan meeting a presentation on Seaside. That will be really cool and I'm looking forward to hearing about Seaside "from the horse's mouth". I've played around with UnCommon Web (Marco Baringer's continuation-based web application framework that is written in CL), so it will be interesting to get the chance to compare/contrast the two. Probably a good topic for a weblog entry too! ;-)
Towards the close of the meeting, I joked with Andrew Catton that it was an "old Vancouver Lisp User Group tradition" that any Smalltalk developers who attend a meeting have to pick up the tab (in consideration for all of the Lisp concepts that influenced the design of Smalltalk). He said that it is an old Smalltalk tradition to be cheap - touché! ;-)
