Many people will remember Conrad Barski's Casting SPELs in Lisp illustrated Lisp tutorial (Conrad's illustrated book, Land of LISP, is due out this summer). I just came upon a Lisp manga and interactive tutorial (both in Japanese) put together by a group of Japanese Lispers. Kawaii!
Last week I came across Bartosz Milewski's blog post criticizing the proposed implementation of futures in the forthcoming C++ standard. Milewski's chief dissatisfaction was the absence of a mechanism for composition. PCall (which I've blogged about before) was in a similar position, so I decided to implement a mechanism for non-deterministic composition and send in a patch. Milewski's blog post also spawned an excellent discussion about futures on Lambda the Ultimate.
Today I rewrote the Parenscript tutorial to use the recently released 1.0 version of Hunchentoot instead of AllegroServe. Edi Weitz and Hans Hübner did a major redesign for the 1.0 release, breaking interface compatibility with previous versions of Hunchentoot. The new interface provides greater Open Implementation capabilities, and makes a sharp demarcation between methods intended for OI and those for regular server programming. I like it.
Beware that if you're not using LispWorks, the 1.0 release of Hunchentoot depends on certain library capabilities (I suspect it's usocket but haven't verified) that as of the time of writing haven't been made into official releases yet. This means that if you get Hunchentoot dependencies via ASDF-Install it will likely not work (for me, it just instantly dropped all incoming connections) - use clbuild to get the latest repository versions of the dependencies.
Earlier last year I found out about Doug Hoyte's Let Over Lambda and after reading the sample chapters promptly got excited. I visited the site recently and found out that the book was published a few months ago. This morning my copy arrived in the mail - I'll be posting a review here later. In the meantime you can obtain your own copy.
LispNYC is once again looking to participate in Google's Summer of Code program. The list of accepted organizations hasn't been announced yet, but you can start proposing summer projects on the LispNYC website.
Just found out about lisp.ru. For a non-English generalist Lisp website the forum gets a fair amount of traffic.
Here are a couple of CL tutorials that I've recently rediscovered and I think are worth sharing:
The first is Chaitanya Gupta's tutorial on the CL condition system. The examples provide a good guide to how restarts work and how you can use them.
Next is Adam Petersen's tutorial on building web applications using Hunchentoot, CL-WHO and Elephant. It shows all the necessary basics from beginning to end, and I don't think I have to state twice that I like the no-framework approach to web development Adam is demonstrating. There's even a little use of Parenscript to generate JS. If someone asks for a tutorial on how to build web applications using Lisp, this is the one I'd refer them to.
Answering to Peter Seibel's appeal for a Google bombing, here are two links, one for a Lisp tutorial, the other for an illustrated Lisp tutorial. I am not just providing these for the sake of altruism, though. It's part of my insidious campaign of making Lisp programmers instead of trying to find them. Due to a particular set of circumstances that has developed recently, I'm putting together a team of web application developers that will do fun things that involve Hunchentoot and Parenscript. If you're in Calgary and would like to get involved, get in touch. If things go according to plan, we will be looking for people outside of Calgary in a few months as well.
