I’m proud to report that the Chicago Lisp group is experiencing monthly membership growth of over 50%! If my math is correct, by this time next year we should have close to 2500 members. That should complicate venue planning :).

Here are our attendees:

Peter Christensen
John Quigley
Craig Luddington
Matt Bone
Brendan Baldwin
Andrew Wolven
Bruce Burdick
Chad Slaughter
Kurt Stephens
Steve Githens
Alex Hemard

ITEMS OF BUSINESS:

Name – None of the name ideas got much support, so we’re sticking with Chicago Lisp until someone comes up with something awesomer.

Project – No one had any ideas for or time to work on a project as a group so that’s also waiting for an awesomer idea.

Server – John and Craig both have servers where they can host things but not allow remote access to. John has a basic homepage at http://www.chicaglisp.org and has a mailing list setup. There might be a wiki in the future. Meeting announcements and recaps will continue to be on Peter’s Chicago Lisp page and then cross posted to the two mailing lists and the chicagolisp.org site.

Next Meeting

WHEN: Friday, May 16th at 7pm.

WHERE: CashNetUSA offices. 200 W. Jackson Blvd, 14th floor, Chicago. Map.

WHAT: Lightning talks. The following people have signed up, more welcome (email Peter if interested or add a comment at Coordinatr)

• Grant Rattke – A simple object system using macros
• Steve Githens – Scripting a Java SOA system using Kawa and Clojure
• Dry runs from the people presenting at the Intro to Lisp Workshop

Intro to Lisp Workshop: We did some pre-planning and delegation. See details here.

Presentation on Combined Object-Lambda Architectures (COLAs):

The inagural presentation of our group was about the work done by the Viewpoints Research Institure (VPRI). The most recognizable name associated with this is Alan Kay, Mr. Invent the Future himself. John Quigley made an excellent slide deck (pdf) where he reviewed the paper “Making COLAs with Pepsi and Coke” (pdf) by Ian Piumarta and put into slightly more comprensible language.

This paper is for the Fundamental New Computer Technologies project at VPRI. The aim of the project is to create a complete computing system in 20,000 lines of code. This system would be everything from the hardware to the UI and include both design and implementation. Having such a compact system would be a useful exploration and learning tool, so every part of it can be inspected and manipulated. They’re currently 18 months into a 5 year project but they already have made intriguing progress.

John’s presentation was about the architecture of the self bootstrapping system. I can’t claim that I understood it all, or even most of it. I was able to keep up mostly because I had come across VPRI’s work on Jeff Moser’s blog earlier in the week so I was familiar with the overview. What I did sort of grasp boggled my mind and definintely but VPRI on my technical radar, if for no other reason than as a technical challenge to aspire to.

If you can understand everything in Piumarta’s paper (or even in John’s summary deck), you’re a whiz. If not, don’t feel bad. I would recommend reading the NSF proposal (pdf) and the first year progress report (pdf). They’re in more accessible, less technically deep language and they have pretty pictures.

Thanks John for setting the bar high right out of the gate!