Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (full disclosure: I work there), has kindly offered to sponsor a dinner for our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Please send mail to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net with a list of attendees so we may order the correct amount of food.

Ivan Krstić will give a 25' talk about Security and Programming Languages. Ivan Krstić http://radian.org/ is notably the prized author of Bitfrost, the security architecture for the OLPC XO laptop.

Greg Cooper will give a 50' talk about FrTime: A Dataflow Extension of DrScheme. Dataflow programming extends functional programming with time-varying values called signals. Signals provide a simple, declarative mechanism for expressing event-driven programs without callbacks or explicit side-effects. This talk will present FrTime, an extension of PLT Scheme with dataflow evaluation. The language's distinguishing features include an event-driven evaluation model, transparent reuse of Scheme code, support for reactive data structures, and integration with the DrScheme programming environment. The talk will include a demonstration of the language and programming environment, along with a discussion of the key design decisions and main ideas underlying the implementation strategy. Greg Cooper developed FrTime while he was a graduate student at Brown University, working with Shriram Krishnamurthi. He now works for ITA Software.

Please note that the meeting is taking place at an unusual date, to accommodate for the availability of our main speaker.

The Lisp Meeting with take place at MIT, room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

PS: The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on April 22nd was a success with 40 participants, despite a few organizational glitches for which I apologize. Thanks a lot to all those who came. I hope we'll meet again and have more of those interesting conversations.

PPS: We're still looking for speakers. We have a lot of potential speakers, but not enough confirmed speakers at scheduled dates. The call for speakers and all the other details are at http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html

PPPS: Please forward this information to people who would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times.

For more information, see our new web site boston-lisp.org. For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or subscribe to our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

ITA Software, a fine employer of Lisp hackers (full disclosure: I work there), has kindly offered to sponsor a dinner for our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Please send mail to boston-lisp-meeting-register at common-lisp.net with a list of attendees so we may order the correct amount of food. No registration, no food.

Peter Dillinger will give a 25' talk about Theorem proving with ACL2s. ACL2, "A Computational Logic for Applicative Common Lisp", was recognized with the 2005 ACM Software System Award for its power and usefulness in verifying safety-critical applications. New users, however, found it difficult to use for a variety of reasons. ACL2s < http://acl2s.peterd.org/acl2s/ > is an Eclipse-based development environment we have made to make ACL2 easier to learn and use. Peter C. Dillinger is a Ph.D. Student at Northeastern University, Panagiotis Manolios, advisor.

Hans Hübner will give a 50' presentation of The BKNR Common Lisp web application development environment. BKNR < http://bknr.net/ > is a one-stop repository of open source Common Lisp modules used to develop and deploy web applications, featuring a pure Lisp transaction based persistence layer. Hans Hübner has been a hacker for over 20 years, and has discovered Common Lisp as his favourite programming language in 2001. He is a freelance consultant whose research interests include persistence systems and hardware to support dynamic programming.

Please note that the meeting is taking place at an unusual date, to accommodate for the availability of the main speaker, who is coming from Berlin (Germany) to talk to us.

The Lisp Meeting with take place at MIT, room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

PS: The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on March 31st was a big success, with about 70 participants. Thanks a lot to all those who came. I hope we'll meet again and have more of those interesting conversations.

PPS: We're still looking for speakers. We have a lot of potential speakers, but not enough confirmed speakers at scheduled dates. The call for speakers and all the other details are at < http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html >.

PPPS: Please forward this information to people who would be interested. Please accept my apologies for your receiving this message multiple times.

For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting or check our RSS feed: http://fare.livejournal.com/data/rss?tag=boston-lisp-meeting

PLEASE REGISTER FOR FOOD! ITA Software has kindly offered to sponsor a dinner for our Monthly Boston Lisp Meeting. Please send mail directly to me fare at tunes (dot org) with list of attendees so I may order the correct amount of food. No registration, no food.

Alexey Radul will speak about What I hate most about Scheme and what I'm doing about it. Alexey Radul is a graduate student at MIT. He uses the Scheme programming language, for which he has written an extension for probabilistic programming.

Rahul Jain will present DefDoc. DefDoc is a lisp-based document description and processing system. Both macros and object-orientation are available so that the description of a document can be focused as much as possible on content and structure. Rahul Jain is a New York based consultant who programs in Common Lisp for fun and profit.

The Lisp Meeting with take place at MIT, room 34-401B. As the numbers indicate, this is in Building 34, on the 4th floor.

MIT map: http://whereis.mit.edu/bin/map?selection=34

Google map: http://maps.google.com/maps?q=50+Vassar+St,+Cambridge,+MA+02139,+USA

PS: The previous Boston Lisp Meeting on March 3rd was a big success, with about 40 attendants. Thanks a lot to all those who came. I hope we'll meet again and have more of those interesting conversations.

PPS: We're more than ever looking for speakers. We have a lot of potential speakers, but few confirmed speakers at scheduled dates. The call for speakers and all the other details are at < http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html >.

For posts related to the Boston Lisp meetings in general, follow this link: http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting

(Please forward this message to interested people. Apologies for message received multiple times. Permanent URL so far: http://fare.livejournal.com/120393.html for this call and http://fare.livejournal.com/tag/boston-lisp-meeting for the monthly meeting in general)

I will be organizing a monthly Boston Lisp Meeting.

By "Lisp", I mean any programmable programming system. However, speakers and attendants will be welcome to discuss any ideas relevant to programmers using or developing such a programmable programming system, whatever language was or wasn't previously used to express those ideas. (Note how I specifically avoided including or excluding any given system as Lisp. Anyone programming a programming system is welcome; people writing COBOL with parentheses will probably get bored.)

The meetings will usually take place on the last Monday of every month at 6pm. (Not the first Monday, which conflicts with the meetings of Grey Thumb, not the 4th Monday which is harder to figure out, not on Tuesdays, and not according to any of the other rules that were or weren't considered. Exceptions will be made to accommodate speakers or organizers.)

Dear friends,

if you are reading my blog and are or can be in the Boston area on the evening of next Saturday December 8th 2007, you are cordially invited to join me at my place for a party to celebrate the passing of my 34th birthday (better than J. H. Christ!) and the upcoming Solstice, Saturnalia, Gravmas, etc.

Send me email for details.

WBZ promised a free movie after sunset at the Hatch Shell on the Esplanade. June 23rd: A young boy finds the golden wrapper and wins a tour through a magnificent chocolate factory, owned by the world's most unusual candy maker! claimed the trailer. The skies were clear, however the weather had been wet in the afternoon. Therefore worried viewers called the announced WBZ hotline to be told that the movie would be shown Come rain or come shine. And so I was among the few hopeful people who went there and brought food for a nice evening. Now guess what: the sun never shines after sunset. So we were quite disappointed to find that the only eggs to hatch there were the mosquitoes'. That's when I realized the food I had brought was myself, and the actual guests were the midges. I expected to be a diner and a spectator, I was the dinner and the spectacle. WBZ: I want my money back!