Thanks to everyone who attended or helped with the Chicago Lisp User Group’s Intro to Lisp Workshop! We had a great turnout (41 people!), a great facility (thanks to IIT’s Institute of Design), food and prizes (thanks to Obtiva), plus there was some Lisp too! This page will (eventually) contain links to all of the information about the workshop, but since most of it isn’t written or produced yet, this will at least give an idea of what to look forward to. All of the presentations were videotaped and those videos will eventually be online. There is also a big stack of feedback forms waiting to be collated, and some of that feedback will be put online.

Attendee Statistics – a breakdown of the programming languages and OS of choice, as well as a geographic breakdown of where attendees came from.

Funniest Comment – someone’s IM status was set to “Developing a speech impediment…”

Presentations

• Setting up a Lisp Development Environment – this actually didn’t end up being much of a presentation, since the setup documents for Linux, OSX, and Windows ended up being so thorough that most people didn’t need to troubleshoot.
• Lisp Basics and Idioms (by Peter Christensen) – my intro talk that covered the history, concepts, and paradigms of Lisp. The goal was to give a big picture and proper mindset for development in Lisp.
  • HTML version of presentation slides (with links, extra resources, etc)
• Macros (by Craig Luddington and Eli Naeher) – an interactive talk on macros, showing basics of macro development, macro examination in SLIME, and a survey of some of the built-in macros of Common Lisp.
• Chat Server Development Demo (by John Quigley) – John started with a quiz-show style review where he tested two unwitting volunteers on their understanding of Lisps execution and development model. After that, he demoed a chat server that he wrote in about 250 lines of Lisp. Due to technical difficulties and time constraints, he wasn’t able to do the live updates, but we were proud to have several minutes of open chat on the server where no one cursed (I think the worst comment was “turd”). John has promised a demo of it at one of our meetings.

Book Raffle Winners

Congratulations to Luke Orland, Janet Kirsch, and (should have written down the third name) who won the following books in our registration raffle.

Gift-bag DVDs

Grant Rettke took the initiative to put together a “gift bag” DVD full of resources for people looking to learn more about Lisp development. The complete list is very long, but here is a summary:

• Electronic versions of books like OnLisp, SICP, etc
• Screencasts and movies like those from the SICP lectures, LispCast, the SLIME movie, etc
• Tons of documents like my SLIME cheat sheet, intro documents for Scheme and Lisp programming, some background and historical documents, etc

We’re looking to make an updated version of this DVD, including the materials from the workshop. Please let me know if you’d be interested one – if there is a lot of interest, we might make another batch and mail them out for a small fee.

After-Party

After the workshop, a dozen or so people walked down to Elephant & Castle Pub and Restaurant. I didn’t go since I had a house full of beautiful women waiting for me (my wife and daughters ;-).

Sponsors

Special thanks to Kevin Taylor of Obtiva for sponsoring the food, drinks, gift DVDs, and the Practical Common Lisp prize book! Obtiva does on-site or outsourced development, and provides training in leading edge technologies.