Boston Lisp Meeting: Thursday 2009-10-29 Alex Plotnick, Daniel Herring
A Boston Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday, October 29th 2009 at 1800 at MIT 34-401B. Alex Plotnick with talk about CLWEB, and Daniel Herring will give a short presentation of LibCL.
Additionally, we will have two 5-minute Lightning Talks, each followed by 2-minute Q&A. Speakers to be announced.
Also, there will be a buffet offered by ITA Software. Registration is not necessary but appreciated. See details below.
1 Alex Plotnick on CLWEB
CLWEB is a literate programming system for Common Lisp in the tradition of Knuth's WEB and CWEB systems. These systems are based on the idea that there are two audiences for every program - the machine on the one hand and human programmers on the other - and that these two audiences have very different requirements for understanding a given program. They take as input a document containing a mixture of source code, TeX, and WEB control codes, and output both a program suitable for compilation or evaluation, and also a TeX file that contains a pretty-printed version of the source code along with accompanying commentary. The former is for the machine, while the latter is ready for typesetting, printing, and reading by a human. CLWEB is of course itself a literate program, written in itself, using (mostly) portable Common Lisp as the source language.
http://www.cs.brandeis.edu/~plotnick/clweb/
Alex Plotnick is a graduate student in computer science at Brandeis University. His interests include natural and computer language semantics, computational linguistics, and philosophy of language.
2 Daniel Herring on LibCL
LibCL is a collection of Libraries for Common Lisp. CL has a wide range of libraries available, yet there are persistent rumors that CL has no libraries, or that they're hard to find and install. LibCL was created to tackle these issues by creating a distribution bundling many libraries into a single download. This presentation will focus on the dream, current progress, and issues which have arisen.
Daniel Herring works as an associate staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. His academic interests center around control theory and walking robotics; practical issues such as computer algebra brought him to lisp.
http://libcl.com/
3 Lightning Talks
At every meeting, before the main talk, there are two slots for strictly timed 5-minute "Lightning Talks" followed by 2 minutes for questions and answers.
The slots for next meeting are still open. Step up and come talk about your pet project! Contact me at fare at tunes.org.
4 Time and Location
The Lisp Meeting will take place on Thursday October 29th 2009 at 1800 (6pm) at MIT 34-401B.
Note that this is not the usual day of the week.
As the numbers indicate, the room is in Building 34, on the 4th floor. This is the usual location, on 50 Vassar Street, Cambridge.
MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34
Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA
Many thanks go to Alexey Radul for arranging for the room, and to MIT for welcoming us.
5 Dinner
ITA Software a fine employer of Lisp hackers (disclaimer: I work there), is kindly purchasing a buffet to accompany our monthly Boston Lisp meeting. Anyone who attends is welcome to partake.
We appreciate it if you let us know you're coming, and what food taboos you have, so that we can order the correct amount and kind of food. Tell us by sending email to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net. We won't send any acknowledgement unless requested; importantly, we'll keep your identity and address confidential and won't communicate any such information to anyone, not even to our sponsors.
6 More about the Meeting
The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on Wednesday, September 30th 2009 had about 20-odd participants. Christine Flood spoke about Project Fortress.
We're always looking for more speakers. The call for speakers and all the other details are at: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html Volunteers to give Lightning Talks are also sought. http://fare.livejournal.com/143723.html
For more information, see our web site http://boston-lisp.org/ For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting
Please forward this information to people you think would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times. My apologies if this announce gets posted to a list where it shouldn't, or fails to get posted to a list where it should. Feedback welcome by private email reply to fare at tunes.org.