[LispSea] charter

[Brandon J. Van Every]

Daniel J Pezely wrote:
> Perhaps we should add to the charter, "Contribute to benefit 
> the Lisp community at large," as a secondary mission.
>
>
> Would those of you on this list who have been quiet mind to 
> comment?  
>   

I'm not the quiet one but I can't help comment.  :-)  I hope this 
doesn't scare anyone into not commenting.  Please someone else feel free.

> Do you agree with the proposed minimal charter?
> (i.e., is the above additional clause redundant due to it 
> being implied by the very existence of this a group?)
>   

It's not actually redundant.  LispSea needs a strong focus on promoting 
Lisp in the Seattle metro area.  So then there's the question of whether 
heaping secondary foci on top of that is a good idea or not.  I'm 
inclined to say it isn't.  In the limit, if you have a primary focus, 
but then invoke Subfocus #2, and Subfocus #3, and Subfocus #4, etc. then 
you really don't have a focus anymore.

On the other hand, there's the issue of what you actually get out of 
people, and what they find appealing.  Drumbeating on a Primary Focus 
doesn't necessarily cause anyone to do it.  Still, an organization's 
leadership should probably get focused on the primary task.  I see a 
difference between people exercising leadership, people who actively 
participate but don't lead, and people who are just showing up to find 
out what's going on.

> What are your expectations and desires for a group?
>   

I'd like to pursue a primary focus of promoting Lisp in Seattle.  That's 
what I previously tried to do with SeaFunc, although it was for 
Functional Programming rather than a specific toolchain.  That proved to 
be an Achilles heel.  We did succeed in creating a sustainable group 
that slowly grows.  We even got a little bit of networking and job 
interest going, in part because there's such a big clump of Amazonians 
in SeaFunc and they do some language experimentation.  But energy for 
promoting FP as a business model isn't there.

I don't need a local group to work on improving Lisp.  I already do 
that, to the extent that Chicken Scheme counts as a Lisp.  Not many 
people help me in that task.  The ones that do, I've established 
relations on the internet with.  Those would be the primary Chicken 
Scheme author, Felix Winkelman, and the primary CMake author, William 
Hoffman.  Without that level of commitment and buy-in, I doubt I would 
have stuck with it.

There's been interest in Chicken Scheme in SeaFunc, but I'm still the 
only one really doing it as far as I know.  I haven't gotten a good dog 
and pony show together to convert people yet.  I am reminded of Jeff 
Henrickson's current position in SeaFunc as the OCaml "odd man out."  
OCaml used to have multiple followers, but I defected for Bigloo Scheme 
due to FFIs, and Francois Rouaix lives in Issaquah now.

I think the Gardeners project is an excellent idea in principle.  In 
practice, really getting things done requires really specific 
partnerships.  People who are capable and commit time and energy.  I 
just don't expect to find those locally.  Very few people have the time 
and energy to do all that stuff, so it's important to cast a wide net on 
the Internet.  The dirty little secret of open source is it's not about 
the software, it's about the people.  When I read the Gardeners 
announcements, with people proposing various projects, I'm surprised 
that anyone responds and takes them seriously.  I'll be even more 
surprised if things actually get done.  It seems some things are in fact 
getting done, I've been analyzing the track record of Gardeners for 
bringing projects to fruition.  It also seems like a lot of projects 
won't make it past the "That would be nice!" stage and they're a waste 
of time. 

I've been trying to do these kinds of business, promotional, and 
technical projects for exotic programming languages for 3 years now, 
with a strong focus on improving Chicken Scheme in the past 9 months.  I 
feel I can say this.

Now, if I got lucky and met someone locally that really was a good 
partner for accomplishing X Y Z, that would be cool.  I did go through a 
Common Lisp booster phase, but I found that FFIs are all a law unto 
themselves, there's nothing Common about them.  So for game development 
I was no better off than in the Scheme universe.  Good open source 
implementations were available for Windows and not for Common Lisp.  
Corman Lisp is inexpensive on Windows, but I wasn't confident in its 
future.  Maybe I'd change my tune if the Windows SBCL port shapes up, 
but I'm not waiting and I've already committed 9 months to making 
Chicken Scheme kick ass.  I bet you SBCL doesn't have a CMake build, for 
instance, and I'm not going to write one for them just yet.  Nine months 
is a lot of time to try to bang something into shape, and I'm going to 
leverage my investment before seeking new investments.

I'm a game developer.  I'm stalking the game industry.  If anyone's 
interested in OpenGL stuff on either Scheme or Common Lisp, give me a 
holler.  Perhaps Collada file formats is a middle ground.


Cheers,
Brandon Van Every