Definitive SLIME Tutorial Movie
Thursday, July 28, 2005
Wow, Marco Baringer is rapidly becoming the Steven Spielberg of the
Lisp movie industry! ;-) Just
yesterday, I commented on his UCW movie. What might not have been
obvious from my posting then was that he actually made two versions of the
movie in a single day (one just to get feedback and one that
incorporated the feedback as well as some polishing)! Now, he has made what will probably be considered the
"definitive"
SLIME tutorial. Zach Beane has
already posted a list of what's in it (from Marco's
original posting to the SLIME developers mailing list), but it's easier just to say
that it's a real SLIME
"how-to". It's definitely not a "SLIME for Dummies" and even
experienced SLIMErs will get something out of Marco's movie. I thought I knew how to use SLIME pretty well before I
saw Marco's movie but I learned quite a few things from it as
well. It's also a great movie to show those Java or C programmers who keep
raving to you about how good Eclipse or Visual Studio are as IDE's. ;-)
Marco
has a few non-standard SLIME keybindings that you'll probably wonder
about if you've used SLIME before and you watch his video. If you're curious, his SLIME setup
is
here. Marco also wrote a summary about his key binding setup
on CLiki.
Since it's the tradition in the movie industry
to post reviews and
comments about new movies, I'll follow that tradition for this
movie! ;-) Here are some comments about the movie by a few industry
notables:
Edi Weitz: "Great stuff"
Luke Gorrie: "Totally brilliant!!"
Paolo Amoroso: "What about a Grahammy award?"
And some random comments on IRC:
"wow, I'm learning so much new stuff from Marco's slime movie :-)"
"it's really good - I'm finally learning how to use the slime
debugger!"
"The slime movie is awesome :^)"
"I'm learning new emacs tricks too! woohoo!"
"wow! I am blown away by the fact that you can evaluate an arbitrary
expression *within* an arbitrary stack frame in slime's debugger!
really. blown away. damn cool."
"this movie is fantastic"
"yeah, more lisp movies, more!"
"This slime video is so exciting I can't stay in my pants"
"do watch the slime movie - it's most excellent"
Here's the location of the movie (55min; 149mb; quicktime encoded mpeg-4) and
torrent (due to the size of the file, please use the torrent if possible):
http://common-lisp.net/movies/slime.mov
http://common-lisp.net/movies/slime.torrent
Watch and enjoy! We'll have to wait till the award ceremonies to see
whether Marco can edge
Rainer Joswig out of the academy awards this year! ;-)
Update-2008-02-09: Peter Christensen wrote
a review and a
transcript of Marco Barringer's SLIME movie.
