[lisp-hh] Hi

[Edi Weitz]

On Mon, 05 Jul 2004 09:54:36 +0200, Arthur Lemmens <alemmens at xs4all.nl> wrote:

> I'm just back from the meeting that took place yesterday. Jim
> Newton's description of his company was in English, my talk (about
> persistence techniques) was in English, Hans Huebner's talk (about
> some ways he has used persistence for his applications) was half
> German half English (he started in German but when I asked questions
> in English he switched to English) and Pascal Costanza's talk was in
> German.
>
> The general conversation was also a nice mix of English and German,
> with a couple of Dutch sentences in between. I think everybody in
> the room was comfortable with English.
>
> So my answer is: yes, don't worry if you don't speak German.

I second that. I think it'd be no problem at all to have an
English-only meeting (except for the occasional "Ist noch Kaffee da?")
if there are enough non-native speakers. (For a suitable value of
"enough" - I think one or two guests are enough to switch to
English... :)

> The best way to guarantee that some of the talks are in English is
> by giving a talk yourself, of course ;-)

Yep. It'd be great if you (Luke) could make it to the next meeting and
talk about, say, SLIME. Or maybe even better give a live demo of how
you actually use it.

> There were about 20 people present yesterday (from the Netherlands,
> Munich, Berlin, Hamburg and probably a few other places in Germany).

Cologne, Oldenburg, Kiel...

> I think it was a great meeting with lots of interesting discussions.
> And it's always nice to see the faces behind names that you only
> know from the Internet.

I'm not sure if we'll have that many people for the next meeting but
who knows. Lisp is definitely not dead, it just smells funny... :)

Cheers,
Edi.