Announce: TWIN CITIES LISP GROUP

[Matthew D. Swank]

If you are interested in lisp please consider going. If someone you
know might be interested, please consider letting them know.

Thanks,

Matt
TWIN CITIES LISP GROUP INAUGURAL MEETING
9 June 2009, 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM CDT
Common Roots Cafe
Corner of 26th and Lyndale, Minneapolis, MN
http://preview.tinyurl.com/tclisp-crc

There's a lisp renaissance out there, spurred by the availability of
several high-quality open source Common Lisp implementations (SBCL,
CMUCL, Clozure CL, and CLISP, at least). After attending the 2009
International Lisp Conference in Cambridge
(http://www.international-lisp-conference.org/2009/index) I was fired
up to see if we could share in some of this renaissance here in the
Twin Cities.

I was also inspired by visiting with the Vancouver Lisp group,
Lispvan. They meet roughly monthly at some location offering coffee,
beer, and wine, where they
have a talk and some mingling.

In the interests of setting up something like this here, I've (well,
Josh Hamell did all the real work) set up a mailman mailing list,
tc-lispers (http://sift.info/mailman/listinfo/tc-lispers_sift.info),
and I've reserved the meeting room at Common Roots Cafe
(http://www.commonrootscafe.com/ourcommunity.htm), which offers the
aforementioned coffee, beer, and wine (and tasty food --- vegetarian is
available and there seem to be at least some vegan options).

At the first meeting John Maraist will talk about the NST unit testing
framework for Common Lisp, which he has been developing at SIFT
(abstract follows). Then we can plan a next meeting, chat, mingle, and
swap stories. Share and learn the latest Lisp applications,
techniques, packages, and implementations. Show off your lambda
tattoos, evil hacks, and wigflip graphics.

Please come if you can and, whether you can or not, please sign up for
the tc-lispers mailing list.

Best,

Robert Goldman

NST: A Unit Test Framework for Common Lisp

In this talk we will introduce the Lisp unit test framework NST. SIFT
developed NST for internal use on a number of ongoing Lisp projects,
and we believe that the system is now mature enough to release more
broadly. In this talk we will review the notion of a unit test, and
introduce the use of NST in Lisp project development. NST's
implementation makes interesting use of a number of Lisp features ---
macro expansion, compile-time execution, metaobject protocols --- and
we will discuss its current implementation as well as the lessons we
learned along the way.

--
"You do not really understand something unless you can explain it to
your grandmother." -- Albert Einstein.

[MatthewMetzger]

Hello Matt,

thanks for posting this. I am interested, but can't go. Please let us
know how it goes if you attend.

-Matthew