[LispSea] starting point

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Daniel Pezely wrote:
>
> I'm looking into reserving a classroom at Seattle Central Community 
> College, even though this group has no direct affiliation with any 
> school.

If the goal is to get business people interested in Lisp, wouldn't an 
Eastside venue such as Bellevue Community College or Digipen be more 
appropriate?  Or a business; it's actually best to avoid schools with 
students if you want business people.  Anyways, on the Seattle side, 
between SCCC and U. Washington, mightn't the latter have more CS clout?  
I'm just having a very hard time seeing business people showing up at 
SCCC.  Who does the WSA usually hit on for meeting space?

>
> Topics: While there is LispBox, which does a good job of getting you 
> started, my first presentation will be to move beyond the learning 
> mode.  Likewise, since installing a free common lisp system involves 
> more than extracting a tar file or even knowing tweaky 'configure' 
> options, the first session will probably be this: MacOSX + sbcl + 
> Emacs + Slime with VirtualPC running FreeBSD (aka, fixing the 
> reddit.com model).

Fine to see.

One of the problems of Common Lisp is "gee how do you try this out for 
cheap on Windows?"  Relevant in this town. 

I dumped the Bigloo Scheme-to-C compiler and started looking at Common 
Lisp to get into a bigger developer community, with more standards and 
possibly jobs.  But on Windows, for games, dealing with C FFIs, and on a 
limited budget, there was no "common" in Common Lisp at all.  Each 
implementation was a right unto its own.  That's no better than the 
Scheme universe, so I moved on to the Chicken Scheme-to-C compiler.  
Somewhat less performance than Bigloo, somewhat larger community, better 
source license (BSD rather than GPL), has some C++ support, has SWIG 
support.  I've made the right decision for the game industry, which is 
what I'm stalking, but I have no idea in any other development space.  
I'm clueless.

I've been trying to get the Chicken MinGW build up to snuff for 9 months 
now.  I'm almost done.

Some brave souls have been trying to port SBCL to Win32.  Judging from 
archives such as http://sbcl-internals.cliki.net/Win32 there's been real 
progress, but it's not ready for prime time.

There is of course CLISP on the cheap and well supported side, but it's 
only an interpreter and that's not very exciting.  Maybe there are some 
market segments where interpreter-only is fine, but I have a performance 
prejudice and tend to regard such things as toys.  If anyone can 
demonstrate anything "significant" in CLISP I'd change my tune, 
particularly if there's money in it.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every