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I'm willing to put a presentation together for PLUG West. I have
studied a bit about Lisp myself and probably know enough to tell
people how to get their feet wet, maybe give some interesting examples
and pointers to some things to pursue further.
Something that I wonder about is what to cover honestly. For a "hit
the ground running quickly", my guess is that you'd want to know what
it is, how to get it, a few things to do with it (probably familiar
things?) and then what to look into further.
That kind of 100k foot intro can probably be done in about an hour.
What I'd think would be useful to show is how to do tasks that a
typical developer (of Python, Ruby or Perl) might have done so they
can see how it can be done using Lisp (eg: fetch a web page, serve a
web page, process a text file).
The problem with that is that it doesn't show a real difference.
My personal experience with Lisp is that it took me quite a long time
before I could 'get' what the point of some of the interesting
features were - I could talk about what I've found to be interesting,
though I don't know if I could make it easily understandable to
non-developers (and even then...as I said, I had to work to grok some
of the concepts).
I've taken a bit of time and put some slides together:
http://asymmetrical-view.com/lisp-presentation/
I've exported a PDF and an 'html' (pngs) from keynote.
It's certainly not done, and I feel like it falls apart a bit just
after the 'process a file' slide...which is where I stopped and where
I'll work to flesh more out.
Kyle
On Jan 18, 2008 1:24 AM, JP Vossen <jp@jpsdomain.org> wrote:
> Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:41:24 -0500
> From: "Toby DiPasquale" <toby@cbcg.net>
>
> >> What I learned of formal programming is almost 20 years old. I'm
> >> top-down, procedural, and I never really "got" this newfangled Object
> >> Oriented stuff, so that's where I'm coming from. I've written a
> >> couple of trivial C programs, with the book in my lap; otherwise I'm
> >> bash & Perl all the way. So I'd be interested in something like:
> >
> > Lisp is 50 years old this year; its anything but "new-fangled".
>
> I wasn't clear. From my perspective, OO is newfangled. I know Lisp has
> been around forever, that's one of the reasons I think it sounds
> interesting enough to try to learn.
> [...]
>
> >> * What's the "best" Lisp compiler for Linux (whatever "best" means)
> >> and how do we get it (clisp?)
> >
> > The answer to this question is almost entirely religious. SBCL is
>
> Uh oh...
>
>
> > generally considered to be the fastest (in generated code) for Common
> > Lisp for the free varieties, Clisp is the most portable and Allegro
> > has the best commercial and library support but is not free. As for
> > Scheme compilers, the consensus is much less overwhelming... since
> > Scheme is often used as a teaching tool and in academia, the culture
> > around Scheme is much more about experimentation and much less about
> > "production-readiness".
>
> I picked clisp out of a hat--err, well an Ubuntu 'aptitude search'
> anyway. But now that I know to look I do find both clisp and sbcl in
> both Etch and Gutsy repos. Good to know... Oh, there seems to be a
> bunch of Scheme stuff in both too, including mzscheme/drscheme.
>
> [...]
> --------------------------------------------------------
> Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 18:04:54 -0800 (PST)
> From: Josh Goldstein <oopjosh@yahoo.com>
>
> > I could talk about Scheme (a LISP dialect, almost the exact same
> thing > as LISP) that would be similar to the Erlang talk, not that I'm an
> > 'expert', or even a 'good public speaker/presenter'.
>
> If you're willing to talk I'd be delighted to listen.
>
>
> >> * How to "think in Lisp" (like, thinking in Perl requires hashes and
> >> Regexp :)
> >From what I have seen, it's thinking in recursion and lists.
>
> OK, that rings a bell from other things I've read about Lisp, which I
> must admit are mostly Paul Graham's essays. :-)
>
> [...]
>
>
> > I only know of Scheme and Lisp, and they're pretty much the same as
> > far as any non-super-expert would see things.
>
> Maybe I should also ask which to start out with then, Lisp or Scheme?
>
> OTOH, I do a lot with Perl and almost all of what I end up needing
> requires lots of pattern matching, very often using PCRE. And I use a
> lot of hashes too, that there may be some data structure laziness
> happening there. I'm not sure I see that same "fit" in Lisp; but hey,
> that's the point of learning something new right?
>
>
> Anyway, thanks to you both for the answers and the book references, I've
> made a note of them.
>
>
> I know we had at least one other person interested, anyone else
> interested in listening or talking?
>
> Thanks,
> JP
> ----------------------------|:::======|-------------------------------
> JP Vossen, CISSP |:::======| jp{at}jpsdomain{dot}org
> My Account, My Opinions |=========| http://www.jpsdomain.org/
> ----------------------------|=========|-------------------------------
> Microsoft has single-handedly nullified Moore's Law.
> Innate design flaws of Windows make a personal firewall, anti-virus
> and anti-malware software mandatory. The resulting software arms race
> has effectively flattened Moore's Law on hardware running Windows.
> ___________________________________________________________________________
>
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--
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Wisdom and Compassion are inseparable.
-- Christmas Humphreys
kyle.burton@gmail.com
http://www.neverlight.com/~mortis
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