Couple of CS dept. assistants and programmers from
other departments of Istanbul Bilgi University came
together to initiate Istanbul Bilgi University's Lisp
Users Group, which is the only official group dedicated
to Lisp in Turkey.
We had our first meeting last Friday which started
around 18:30 by watching Baringer's SLIME movie
in an interactive fashion (which means I stay in
back of the laptop which is connected to a projector
and whenever some Lisp newbies hesitate on something
the video is paused or rewind, the questions are
answered, etc.) and went on with a very active
chat session that lasted for more than 5 hours.
Currently we have a humble site running on cl-wiki:
http://church.cs.bilgi.edu.tr/lcg/
(Yes, the name of the server refers to the man
who showed a few things to the creator of Lisp ;-)
as well as an active e-mail list.
We are about 10 people and our spectrum ranges
from complete beginners to comp.lang.lisp citizens
who've been using Common Lisp for at least 15
years. Quite a distribution I guess having both
extremes. (The age distribution of the community
is between 20-40, academic stuff from the university,
professional programmer from the university and some professional
programmers from commercial software companies as well
as self-educated "geek"s ;-))
We started to announce our group to the public
(using Internet and TV) and trying to help
people get their feet wet with Lisp. Some programmers
are interested and they are bombarding us with lots
of questions.
We plan to arrange periodical meetings as reqular
as possible and discover "the Wonderful World of Lisp" ;-)
Our main purpose is to show people things that
they never met before and that there are very
different programming paradigms and technologies
other than the ones which are backed by giants
such as Sun, MS, IBM, etc. by pouring billions of
dollars. Thus even though Common Lisp is our
main concern we are open to people who can show
us a few tricks in Prolog, Haskell, OCaml, etc.
(Of course we'll always keep on saying, huh! this
can be done better in Lisp, or at least we can
come up with a macro system that implements your
system as an embedded domain specific language
or some foreing function interface, lib. etc., whatever :)
We'll appreciate any suggestions from comp.lang.lisp
citizens to create a larger and more productive
CL community in Turkey.
For the curious, here's where those Turkish
Lispers live:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkey
Happy hacking,
--
Emre Sevinc
eMBA Software Developer Actively engaged in:
http:www.bilgi.edu.tr http://ileriseviye.org
http://www.bilgi.edu.tr http://fazlamesai.net
Cognitive Science Student http://cazci.com
http://www.cogsci.boun.edu.tr