[boston-lisp] Boston Lisp Meeting Thursday 2009-10-29: Alex Plotnick, Daniel Herring

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

                           Boston Lisp Meeting:
                           Thursday 2009-10-29
                      Alex Plotnick, Daniel Herring

                 http://fare.livejournal.com/147676.html

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 self-contained collection of portable, free Common Lisp
libraries. LibCL is released on a quarterly cycle and provides the
following features. Simple install: download a single file per release.
Integration: libraries are tested to work with each other. Community
building: aiming for shared licensing and ownership of packages. Platform
neutrality: the libraries should be portable across implementations and
OSs. Accountability: public read-only git repositories track full history.

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.