We (Jao, Jordi, Thomas, Andrew, and myself) had a lovely but somewhat
unstructured meeting last Wednesday, which I promised to write up, so
here we are.
First, the program, such as it was: Thomas gave a lovely and interesting
talk on the state of GUI construction languages. Thomas would like to
construct GUIs rapidly, with declarative languages, and the ability to
hook in programs to parts of those GUIs, and the ability to have a
graphical GUI designer that integrates with the text of the program --
integrates, in the sense that when you change something in the GUI
designer, the corresponding declarative text changes -- and only that
text changes.
So the discussion went rollicking, about PLT Scheme and XML, about XAML
and Flash/FLEX, about Self, Smalltalk, morphs, and cloning... It was
good times.
But something that most of you have probably realized is that our
technical program has been losing rigidity as time goes on. This isn't
necessarily a bad thing, but in our context it probably is: more
structure can make for better, more intense meetings.
To that end, we decided to have "meeting chair[person]s" for each
meeting -- a responsibility that will rotate around, changing after
every meeting. The meeting chair is responsible for choosing the theme,
organizing the format and speakers, and the communication for the event
-- basically a mail to the list, though we need to get on Xach's Lisp
meetings calendar as well.
Jordi is the first chair; see his meeting announcement for the exciting
details.
Other thoughts that were brought up at the meeting, in an undigested
order:
* Would be nice to have an "evangelical" day, presenting what it is
that we're about, possibly with a student (master's level?) focus
* We should reach out to the local clojure community, if it exists
* We need to advertise (get the word out) more
* Upcoming smalltalk conference that we could pull speakers from
* Talk length: 30 minutes ideally, though Jao urges flexibility
* Should we re-start PLAI? The general feeling was that we enjoyed it,
but Thomas felt there was perhaps a lack of interest.
* Invited speakers? We should at least try to get Felleisen, as he's
speaking at the http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/.
Pending topics that people said they would like to discuss:
* Andrew: program derivation, numerical programming
* Jordi: partial evaluation, history of computer programming (how many
decisions were made by accident?), computer science not engineering,
* "fringe window managers" -- xmonad, stumpwm, ...
* Andy: hygienic macros (the how and the why)
* Jao: geiser (by popular demand)
Happy hacking!
Andy
--
http://wingolog.org/