From: Ken Tilton
Subject: Lisp may not be dead, but...
Date: 
Message-ID: <DqIag.13$uG3.8@fe08.lga>
...the ALU sure is pushing up daisies at a rate that would make any 
other pile of manure proud.

Here we are, 2006, Google Summer of Code, and are there any mentors over 
at the ALU for Lisp projects? I guess not, because so far this Open 
Source Fairy is still down for /four/.

Actually, one of those is PyCells, a port of Cells to Python, and since 
there seems to be actual oxygen-breathing life in the Python camp, guess 
where my effort will be going this summer?

The ALU (what? 200 members on the extended board?) was invited to 
paricipate, and exactly one (1) responded, and that guy just wants to 
sell more books! I realize promoting Lisp is not why the ALU... hang on. 
No, sorry, what a joke.

Fortunately I happen to know that c.l.lisp is a great crowd of energetic 
and savvy Lisp developers, and we have like four more days to sign up 
mentors, so please get in touch with me or Heow "The Man" at Lisp-NYC if 
you have any interest.

Mentoring is no burden at all (except apparently for committee-joining, 
conference-holding, free-donut-chomping do-nothings like the ALU) yet in 
my experience an experienced old hand can do a student surprising good 
with just a word here and there.

Remember, if youse people do not step up I have to ask the yobbos on 
#lisp. Please. Not that!

:)

kenny

-- 
Cells: http://common-lisp.net/project/cells/

"Have you ever been in a relationship?"
    Attorney for Mary Winkler, confessed killer of her
    minister husband, when asked if the couple had
    marital problems.
From: Martin Rubey
Subject: Re: Lisp may not be dead, but...
Date: 
Message-ID: <85d5ebbtcn.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
Dear all,

I just read Kenny Tiltons mail that LispNyc is still looking for mentors, and I
was thinking...

Well, as you all know, I still hope that someone is going to improve the
interpreter currently available in Axiom to make it understand at least some
parts of the Aldor improvements: treat types truly as first class objects,
allow dependent types, ...

To be honest, I think that given that Aldor becomes free, I think that Spad
should die as soon as possible. In fact, it will die pretty soon. The Aldor
libraries are by far superiour. I'm not going to write any more spad code and
I'm just about to port my stuff to Aldor.

Although currently Axiom is quite lispy, this will change dramatically when
Aldor becomes truly open source. Aldor is written mainly in C, I believe. Yes,
it is able to compile to lisp, so why not keep the Axiom interpreter in Lisp?

PLEASE! (I know it's a difficult job, I cannot do it, but maybe there is
somebody out there with the appropriate knowledge...)




Martin