[chicago-lisp] Thanks John, moving to Tekniks list

[John Quigley]

Peter Christensen wrote:
> For instance, will everyone work on their own projects, or will people team 
> up and focus on a project together?

The Programming Tonight meetings have been very unstructured in nature.  As in, people do absolutely whatever they want.  There are projects underway that involve a single developer, multiple devs working in a traditional open source/distributed manner, and XP pair programming work.

I think the point of this is to meet new people and get your ideas out there.  If your ideas are attractive, you'll certainly get some mind share from others.  While I'm working on something right now, I'm always up for working collaboratively on interesting problem spaces.

We avoid structuring this event much, because open communication and free ideas seem best suited to the current environment.  Plus, nobody wants to deal with the overhead of organizing anything too structured.

> Could you also give a blurb about Programming Tonight?  How many people, what 
> kinds of projects, any good results?

We generally have about 10 to 20 people I would say.  We're a fairly new group, and haven't seen any major projects, but amongst the little cool hacks, some more heavy weight implementations include:

 - partial text XML search engine, Python (Tristan and myself)
 - a micro Lisp implemented in the new Io language (myself)
 - single player action game, still under development (Dan)
 - link aggregating web service, just beginning development (lots of folks)

I'm of an entrepreneurial mindset, so I'm often pushing for ideas that we could maybe sell one day.  Who knows, but we haven't developed anything of this quality yet.

> Is the idea to merge with them, work alongside them to piggyback off of a larger
> group, look for other like-minded people outside of the list, etc?

The idea is to merge with them, and splinter off when we reach critical mass if we feel that would be beneficial.  The Linux group has a more systems-focused mindset as you might imagine, so I think it would make sense for our group to become separate and distinct at some point, focusing on higher-level abstractions or theoretical programming concepts.  I leave all this open to decide upon by our members at some future time.

Programming Tonight is large and established enough to make it feasible way to bootstrap a new group.

> Thanks for taking the initiative to work on these kind of things 

Absolutely, it's really my pleasure =)  Thanks so much for your interest.

All my best,
John Quigley