Date: March 2, 2010
Location: Linux Caffe
Attending: - Paul Tarvydas
- Justin (Paul's son)
- Vish Singh
- Mark Bolusmjak
- Brian Connoy
- Abram Hindle
This was a general discussion meeting.
Vish's notes: - Mark demoed his Scheme compiler written in Javascript: http://github.com/z5h/zb-lisp - based on Dybvig's "Three Scheme Implementations" paper - compiles Scheme not to Javascript, but to a representation suitable for execution upon a simple virtual machine - why write it in Javascript? for fun. Javascript is sort of an interesting language, if you pick and choose certain parts of it. - also, it's cool to have a compiler that can basically run on any machine (since we all have browsers)
- Mark: Git and Github are both really cool - Paul asked about the pros/cons of Git and distributed version control systems (DVCS) generally - Abram explained the fundamental differences between centralized and distributed version control systems - Abram: why the big fuss when Github goes down? by the nature of Git, it shouldn't matter.. you can pull from any copy of the repository - within DVCS, should one use Git or Mercurial? - Vish: Git is MacGyver, Mercurial is James Bond
- Abram demoed his entry to the Google AI Challenge (a challenge to produce a Tron AI) - didn't have a lot of time to work on it, was buggy but did ok - Abram: Common Lisp doesn't have a function to copy an array? - interesting: winner of the challenge analyzes his program
- Brian gave a demo of Visual Lisp in AutoCAD - a very limited Lisp, lacking features we have come to take for granted (such as lexical closures) - Common Lisp can interact with AutoCAD, but you lose some of the integration you get with Visual Lisp - Abram suggested writing a compiler from a modern Lisp to Visual Lisp
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