[chicago-lisp] All quiet on the Midwestern front?

[Kick Damien-DKICK1]

Michael Lee [lee at iit.edu] wrote:

> Hi --- I'm a recent sign-up from the city.  Could anyone briefly
> describe what would be on the agenda of such a meeting, if it were
> to take place?

Wow, an agenda?  I dunno know about all that <smile>.  How about we
start with some introductions, why we've subscribed to the list, etc.?
I suppose that I should eventually get around to writing up my Road To
Lisp <http://www.cliki.net/The%20Road%20to%20Lisp%20Survey>,
eventually.

Basically, I'm hoping that Chicago Lisp will be a chance to not be the
only person I know, aside from comp.lang.lisp, interested in Lisp.
I've been working for Motorola for the past eight years, developing
software related to the core mobile telephony network primarily in
C/C++ during that time, though I've been working on/with a test
execution system written in Tcl for the past year and a half, more or
less.  Before that, I was an undergraduate student at Marquette
University, where I was first exposed to Lisp in an "Intro to AI"
class.  It was the typical intro to Lisp.  The list was the only data
structure mentioned.  It was, oddly enough, a Lisp implementation
running on VAX/VMS.  Probably only had an interpreter.  I really liked
Lisp when I first encountered it, for some reason, I actually liked
all the parenthesis, but never had much of a chance to do anything
with it after that one class.  I was reminded of Lisp, interestingly
enough, by reading things about multiple dispatch in C++ from Scott
Meyers, Andrei Alexandrescu, and Bjarne Stroustrup, usually mentioning
that CLOS already had builtin support for it.  I also ran across some
stuff on /. <http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=lisp>
<http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=slashdot+lisp>: Lisp as an
Alternative to Java, Kent Pitman's interview, etc.  And since then,
I've read Paul Graham's _ANSI Common Lisp_, CLTL2, _Object Oriented
Programming in Common Lisp_, and I'm still working through PAIP and
AMOP.

All of this reading is all well and good but <pause> well, it's just
reading.  I wish I had an excuse to use Lisp in anger.  I've been
sneaking it into silly little utilities; I don't always reach for Perl
anymore.  I have aikido lessons in the evenings and I don't sit in my
apartment enough on the weekends to have a lot of time to code for
fun.  I'm looking for other avenues.  What are other people working
on?  Is anyone using any of this stuff in anger?  I'm actually quite
interested to hear a bit more from Paul Dietz, as he is also a
Motorola employee.  What about jobs in the Chicago area that might
involve Lisp?  Personally, I don't have any idea what an agenda for
the first Chicago Lisp meeting should look like but these are some of
the general topics of interest to me.  Actually, I live in Chicago
(Wicker Park) but I work in Arlington Heights; I don't really often
make it out to the suburbs on the weekends.

What about everybody else?

--
Damien Kick