Online Lisp Meeting #8

[Michał "phoe" Herda]

This is a small reminder: we are starting in 80 minutes.

~phoe

On 07.09.2020 11:45, Michał "phoe" Herda wrote:
> Hello, hey, hi, greetings!
>
> I am terribly sorry for posting the announcement for the next Online
> Lisp Meeting so late, since it will be in merely two days from now. I
> hope that most of you have already got slightly used to the
> bi-or-tri-weekly scheme of the Meetings and I am doubly sorry since I
> shall need to bend this one as well: I will announce two meetings, the
> eight, and the ninth, with just a week of delay between the two. (I will
> be unavailable during the rest of September, since life outside Lisp
> demands my attention.)
>
> The 2^3th meeting will contain a re-stream of a talk by Andrew Sengul,
> who will be presenting April, a compiler from the APL language to Common
> Lisp. (The announcement for the 3^2th meeting will come in a separate mail.)
>
>> APL stands for Array Programming Language and, as the name suggests,
>> is focused on working with arrays, making it great for for graphics,
>> signal processing, statistical work and more.
>>
>> Using APL within Lisp opens vast possibilities for working with
>> structured data. Traditionally, APL is implemented in the form of a
>> monolithic interpreter, and feeding data from databases and other
>> external APIs into these interpreters and getting the results back in
>> a usable format can be daunting.
>>
>> April is different. Compiling APL expressions into Lisp means that any
>> data that can be formatted as a number or character array in Lisp can
>> be operated upon using APL. Often, dozens of lines of number-crunching
>> code with many nested loops can be replaced by a single line of APL.
>> If you're working on a Lisp application that involves many operations
>> on arrays or uses complex algorithms in general, April can
>> substantially speed up your development process.
>>
>> In this talk Andrew will recount the trials of developing a new APL
>> compiler from scratch and cover some of April's unique advantages,
>> including macros that make it easy to extend and modify the language.
>>
>> This presentation will also feature a sneak preview of Bloxl, a
>> hardware startup powered by Common Lisp with April. Bloxl is producing
>> a new luminous structural display technology; with Bloxl, you can
>> build transparent glass walls that light up with software-controlled
>> pixel graphics. You can see more on the Bloxl website at https://bloxl.co.
>>
>> The original talk that will be restreamed will happen the day before
>> (https://www.meetup.com/LispNYC/events/vqhmbpybcmblb/). In order to
>> make the talk more accessible to European audiences (the original will
>> start at midnight CEST!), I have offered to re-stream the whole talk
>> with the ability to chat with the speaker on Twitch, which Andrew has
>> accepted.
> A short Jitsi talk with everyone will happen just after the meeting -
> everyone is invited! (I think it's better to organize those just after
> the meetings, because then they actually happen.)
>
> Date/time/location:
>
>     Date: 9th September 2020
>     Time: 13:00 CEST - https://time.is/en/CEST
>     Talk: https://www.twitch.tv/TwitchPlaysCommonLisp
>     Hangout: https://chat.heisig.xyz/TwitchPlaysCommonLisp @ 14:30
>
> Massive thanks to Marco Heisig for providing the Jitsi instance where we
> can hang out after the talk.
>
> A mailing list has been created for the purpose of organizing and
> promoting the online talks. Further announcements will be posted there.
> See https://mailman.common-lisp.net/listinfo/online-lisp-meets
>
> More videos welcome - please record and send me anything that you find
> interesting and is in any way related to Lisp.
>
> BR and see you!
> Michał "phoe" Herda
>