Twin Cities Lisp Group Inaugural Meeting
Friday, May 8, 2009
Two years ago, Robert Goldman gave a presentation to our Vancouver lispvan group. I'm pleased to note that he's decided to start up his own Lisp User Group in Minneapolis. Here are the details of their upcoming inaugural meeting:
If you will be in the Twin Cities area on June 9, be sure to attend this new user group meeting. Best wishes to Robert and all the other Twin Cities lispers! By the way, if anyone else is inspired to start a new Lisp User Group, you might want to read my "How to start a Lisp User Group" blog post. I've tried to summarize my experiences in that post.TWIN CITIES LISP GROUP INAUGURAL MEETING 9 June 2009, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CDT Common Roots Cafe Corner of 26th and Lyndale, Minneapolis, MN http://preview.tinyurl.com/tclisp-crc Temporary web page: http://rpgoldman.real-time.com/tc-lisp.html
There's a lisp renaissance out there, spurred by the availability of several high-quality open source Common Lisp implementations (SBCL, CMUCL, Clozure CL, and CLISP, at least). After attending the 2009 International Lisp Conference in Cambridge ( http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2009/index) I was fired up to see if we could share in some of this renaissance here in the Twin Cities.
I was also inspired by visiting with the Vancouver Lisp group, Lispvan. They meet roughly monthly at some location offering coffee, beer, and wine, where they have a talk and some mingling.
In the interests of setting up something like this here, I've (well, Josh Hamell did all the real work) set up a mailman mailing list, tc-lispers ( http://sift.info/mailman/listinfo/tc-lispers_sift.info), and I've reserved the meeting room at Common Roots Cafe ( http://www.commonrootscafe.com/ourcommunity.htm), which offers the aforementioned coffee, beer, and wine (and tasty food --- vegetarian is available and there seem to be at least some vegan options).
At the first meeting John Maraist will talk about the NST unit testing framework for Common Lisp, which he has been developing at SIFT (abstract follows). Then we can plan a next meeting, chat, mingle, and swap stories. Share and learn the latest Lisp applications, techniques, packages, and implementations. Show off your lambda tattoos, evil hacks, and wigflip graphics.
Please come if you can and, whether you can or not, please sign up for the tc-lispers mailing list.
Best,
Robert Goldman
NST: A Unit Test Framework for Common Lisp
In this talk we will introduce the Lisp unit test framework NST. SIFT developed NST for internal use on a number of ongoing Lisp projects, and we believe that the system is now mature enough to release more broadly. In this talk we will review the notion of a unit test, and introduce the use of NST in Lisp project development. NST's implementation makes interesting use of a number of Lisp features --- macro expansion, compile-time execution, metaobject protocols --- and we will discuss its current implementation as well as the lessons we learned along the way.
