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Request for Lightning Talk on Arc: 2pm Saturday, June 2nd -- Mountain View, CA
3 points by nick_a 4742 days ago | 8 comments
The Bay Area Lisp & Scheme Users Group is having a meeting at 2pm on Saturday June 2nd at the 500 startups office in Mountain View, Ca:

http://www.meetup.com/balisp/events/65877292/

The format is educational lightning talks (5 min + 5 min QA). We are looking for someone to do one on Arc. We have had 2 previous talks mentioning Arc from so far, but none diving heavily into the topic.

Other topics on the 2nd will include "Randomized Parallel Marking in Mark-and-Sweep Garbage Collectors" by Jay Reynolds Freeman and "Viper.io: dynamic reasoning based on REST resources" by Brian Guarraci.



3 points by rocketnia 4733 days ago | link

akkartik, waterhouse, idoh, and I are here at the event. :D

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1 point by zck 4733 days ago | link

So, how'd it go? Did someone end up presenting Arc? I've been considering presenting Arc to the Lisp group in NYC, if I can put together a five-minute presentation for Lispers who don't know much about Arc.

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1 point by akkartik 4732 days ago | link

It was very fun, but no talk on arc. I ended up talking about http://arclanguage.org/item?id=16378. I'd love to see a presentation on arc; I wasn't sure five minutes was nearly enough.

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1 point by zck 4732 days ago | link

That sounds like a good talk. Anything beyond your post? I must admit that I haven't put enough time into the macro-apply situation, so I'm not even up to speed with your post, butI'd love to see slides if you have them.

My reason for giving a five-minute talk about Arc is -- well, beyond the usual "I don't know if I can do a longer one" -- I've talked to a few Lispers about Arc, and they're not very excited about it. In fact, it's denigrated. I wanted to give a short talk to convince people they want to learn more. Maybe not 5 minutes, but 15? I don't know.

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2 points by akkartik 4732 days ago | link

Yeah I have other, less politically-correct, reasons not to want to talk to lispers about arc :) The reasons for not wanting to talk are themselves hard to talk about.

I'm not interested in trying to convince lispers about anything because they are pretty close-minded about their tools. Trying to evangelize anything risks a minor flamewar, and even if you avoid flamewars you end up thinking you might have better spent your time talking about something else.

At yesterday's talk there was the obligatory old dude speculating that I might be able to accomplish my already-eval shenanigans using reader macros on backquote. In itself there's nothing wrong with the idea. It's totally false[1], but that's ok. The bigger criticism is that I could predict ahead of time that I'd get some question like that. There's a huge bias in the sorts of questions that get asked by CLers, and that predictability is utterly boring. I find questions about why I don't use Apple similarly boring.

Crotchety old lispers are fun to talk to. Often I learn some gem I couldn't find anywhere else. At the risk of sounding condescending, I'm aware I'm on my way to being a crochety old man myself[2]. I've just learned to avoid certain topics -- and to change the subject when others don't know to avoid them -- so we can all get along.

Talking about lisps is like talking about text-editors. Perhaps it's more important to focus on what we do with our tools. A cool app in arc will be more effective at getting lispers to engage with arc than any words we can come up with. But you'll still have to fend off questions about why you couldn't just use Common Lisp for the purpose. Snort.

That said, I still would love to watch you try to explain arc to non-arc folks. Sometimes explaining a thing helps understand it better. The audience will almost all take it constructively. You'll just need to put up with the prospect of the occasional miscreant. And if you do you'll be a better man than me.

[1] I don't even need to know anything about reader macros to make that assertion, because my feature isn't just some syntactic sugar. It requires semantic support for fexprs. CL has no fexprs. QED.

[2] My girlfriend says I must have been 60 when I was born.

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I don't want to sound like it was a terrible time. I had a fantastic time there, lots of great conversation with a lot of interesting people, and will definitely go back the next time. But even at a lisp meetup the best conversation is only tangentially about lisp. There was one lightning talk about building a distributed RDBMS inspired by Connection Machine principles. The guy didn't build it in lisp, but he figured lispers might be worth showing it to. And that is awesome; I think many people got a lot out of it.

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1 point by akkartik 4733 days ago | link

Eek, accidental downvote.

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2 points by nick_a 4742 days ago | link

Also, if anyone would like to do a long-form presentation (20 min + 5 min QA) there will be a slot at the next meetup (at the end of June).

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1 point by kinleyd 4741 days ago | link

Time for akkartik to step up to the plate? We have to put a good foot forward for arclanguage.org! Should be a cinch for you. :)

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