[toronto-lisp] Minutes of July meeting

[Ravi Desai]

Here we go. Sorry about taking so long to send it.
If anyone doesn't know, its in org-mode.
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* Present
   Paul
   Jos'h
   Mark
   Leo
   Ravi

* Discussion
** AutoLISP and its use in industrial programming
*** John Walker - cofounder of Autodesk
     www.fourmilab.ch
     + Book: "The autodesk file" : Early history of Autodesk
       Required reading for software startups
*** AutoCAD Electrical
     Program that automates making drawings for use in factories
     Nate Holt
     Lisp software.  250K lines of code.  Only 2 programmers writing it.
     Said to always meet deadlines with fewer bugs than the competition.
** Clojure
    Why is it the most commercially used mostly-functional language? -> 
concurrency
    JVM good.  Java bad.
*** Datomic
     Immutable database by Rich Hickey
     Time-based queries
     + Helps with testing
     Interface language : Datalog
** Erlang
    Hot code-swapping isn't a feature.  It just happens when you have 
tail-recursion and immutable state
** Programming in industry
*** Bad onions
     One person makes a tool, and future programmers build filters upon 
them.  Sometimes its best to just start over
*** Authentication in industry
     + There is none
     + HP printers
       Its possible to update their firmware, turn them into zombies and 
attack an office with them.
** Reading material
*** Fred Brooks
     Mythical man-month : no silver bullet : IT managers should read this
*** Joel on Software
     http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html

* Projects
** Leo
    Erlang port of a 4chan-like image board
    Uses Erlang web-framework called Nitrogen : http://nitrogenproject.com/
    Comet: protocol to keep http sessions alive