Hi guys,
I was in talk with a VERY prestigious potential speaker in the past
days and he seemed interested. But someone else in the group attempted
to contact him and, unfortunately, this ruined the whole effort. I was
a little upset, to say the least.
If you intend to invite prestigious speakers in behalf of the MSLUG, I
STRONGLY suggest (mark my words) that you pass through the official
channels (i.e. Marc and I) first. We are certainly in a better
position to make attractive offers and/or organize bigger events if
required (unless, of course, you work for an organization that can pay
those speakers and organize the event).
The Scheme/Lisp world is so small. We must combine our efforts instead
of competing with each other.
--
Dominique Boucher, Ph.D.
The Scheme Way Project
http://schemeway.sourceforge.net
BTW, on the ruby-talk mailing-list, there are currently threads going on
about Paul Graham and about the (rather large) influence of LISP/Scheme on
Ruby.
For those who don't know, Ruby borrows this from LISP/Scheme:
* everything's an expression... well, except for some syntactic quirks,
but essentially it's there.
* the semicolon is an operator such that a;b;c;... behaves like LISP's
(progn a b c ...)
* lexical closures and continuations
* multiple inheritance with method lookup backtracking, just like
CLOS's (call-next-method). (Perl recently got this feature
*because* Ruby had it)
* dispatch on singletons. (However this is much different from the
one in CLOS, because Ruby is much more Smalltalk-like than Lisp-like)
* Symbols (are Smalltalk-like but look like LISP keywords because of
colon-prefix)
* "!" and "?" suffixes on some methodnames.
* mark-and-sweep; load-time is part of run-time; eval (but on strings);
untyped variables, mostly holding pointers to type-tagged objects, except
some "unboxed objects"; etc; ... the above list was off the top of my mind
so it's by no means complete and I may have even skipped important
borrowings.
_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montréal QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju
The next meeting of the Montreal Scheme/Lisp User Group
will be held on Wednesday, March 16th 2005.
Untangling the Web with Parentheses
-----------------------------------
Speaker: Yannick Gingras
Laboratoire de Combinatoire et d'Informatique Mathématique
Université du Québec à Montréal
Common Lisp has many features that makes it an ideal language for
developing web applications. This presentation will review some of
those and show three applications developed using Common Lisp: a
fractal generator, a phylogenetic tree viewer and a browser for
genomic similarities. The presentation will be in French with slides
in English.
For more information, visit:
http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~boucherd/mslug/mslug-home-en.html
--
Dominique Boucher, Ph.D.
The Scheme Way Project
http://schemeway.sourceforge.net