The November 27th meeting went very well, with more than a dozen people showing up.
John Fremlin’s presentation was not, as I’d claimed, on his Lisp web server (a presentation he actually gave at a recent TLUG meeting) but was instead called Glimpses of Lisp: Fibonacci and the Netflix Prize, and give some insight into how one does things differently in Lisp over other languages, with some particularly interesting points about compile-time optimization via the macro system. He’s graciously allowed us to host a copy of his slides.
The October 30th meeting was almost as packed (close to a dozen people) as the October 9th meeting, which is very encouraging. I’m hoping we’ll do as well next month, and perhaps watch our Lisp contingent grow a bit.
On November 27th John Fremlin will be talking about his web server written in Lisp, and Jianshi Huang will give a presentation on Qi. As usual, full information is on the TSAC home page.
Well, the October 9th meeting went quite well, with close to a dozen people showing up, including a couple of new folks, and lot of tech. talk under the guse of an hour and a half of “introductions.” We ended up getting so involved in the meeting, it was almost eleven before we made it out to dinner! And we covered hardly any of the ICFP stuff.
So the next meeting, at 7:30 on Thursday, October 30th, will finish off the ICFP coverage, and it looks like we’ve got a LISP presentation lined up for November. We’re growing and getting busy!
I’m at ICFP 2008 right now, so we’re moving the meeting this month a couple of weeks later, to October 9th. I’ll be giving a report on ICFP, and will of course have copies of the proceedings available for perusal.
As some have heard, Lars and I have been hacking a bit in our spare time on a distributed mailing list manager called ”mhailist” written in Haskell. Even in its extremely primitive state, it’s been working well enough for our internal list for discussing its development, we we thought we’d give it a try for TSAC.
8 attendees. This meeting we had two presentations on QuickCheck, followed by discussions. At the end of the meeting we began to organize our team for the ICFP Contest.
The first presentation was done by Daisuke Ikegami, Ph.D, from Osaka.
He discussed the theory of QuickCheck, practical uses, and ended his presentation with a few samples of QuickCheck written in Haskell. You can find his presentation here
The second presenter was Curt Sampson, who recently attended John Hughes' course on QuickCheck in Erlang. He took this as a chance to presente the group with a few samples of QuickCheck in Erlang, which was followed by discussion.
Dinner with John Hughes , author of Why Functional Programming Matters.
One other member besides Curt showed up, leaving us rather outnumbered by the Erlang folks, but nonetheless we got to discuss some interesting Haskell stuff late into the night.
5 attendees. Taking a break from Curt and his darn Haskell, Johan Berntsson will gave a presentation on a project he’s been working on in Lisp: a compiler that reads a protocol definition file for Second Life (the on-line game), and outputs c# or c++ code. He also demonstrated a fairly neat Lisp-mode for vim to which he’s been contributing. Later, after some discussion, several people agreed that we should field a team in the ICFP contest in July, just for the fun and experience of it. Haskell is the likely language, mainly because Curt has all of the tools and a bunch of experience with it.