Boston Lisp July 27, 2009

Who:
Bruce Lewis will speak about OurDoings, and Richard Kreuter will speak about defsystems and deliverables, or, unary REQUIRE for the win!

Where:
MIT, Room 34-401B

MIT map:
http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map:
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

Bruce Lewis will speak about http://OurDoings.com/, a web site that solves the problem faced by people who take a lot of pictures, but don't have much time to share them online. Its approach to the problem is straightforward, but unique. In this talk, Bruce will use the OurDoings web site as context in which to explain how macros enable a kind of abstraction that functions do not, and how this form of abstraction is useful in common problems that thousands of programmers face.

Bruce Lewis left the Lisp world after completing MIT 6.001 (Structure and Interpetation of Computer Programs) in Spring, 1987.
Ten years later, seeking a better way to write database-driven web applications, he created http://brl.sourceforge.net/, the "Beautiful Report Language", an alternative to Perl ("Practical Extraction and Report Language") that dominated web development at the time. Bruce lives in Beverly, Massachusetts with his wife and three children.

Richard Kreuter will speak about Defsystems and deliverables, or, unary REQUIRE for the win! Common Lisp users have employed a succession of system construction tools("defsystems") over the years. Howsoever good a defsystem tool might be, overuse of system construction tools creates needless technical and social problems in the community and confounds newcomer and professional alike. This presentation will cover some of the drawbacks of the traditional uses of defsystems, and proposes some approaches to deploying Lisp software intended to make Lisp library usage more tractable than defsystems make it.

Richard Kreuter is a software developer in the Boston area. He has worked on Steel Bank Common Lisp, driven himself nuts by too much reading of the Common Lisp standard, and is likely to be the last person on earth who thinks CL's pathnames still are a good idea.

Official Website: http://fare.livejournal.com/145087.html