Ray de Lacaze#

Tue, 22 Jun 2004 18:57:00 +0000

Ray de Lacaze resigns as ALU president. If you read Lemonodor you'll have picked this up already; if you read Planet Lisp, likewise but you'll have missed the comments, which I hope will shortly become an interesting debate about wat the ALU's role should be anyway. ILC02 was immense fun for me: not only the formal presentations, but also just hanging out and discussing ideas with people I'd only previously met online. But then, LSM was pretty cool too: you don't have to spend megabucks and an ulcer to get interesting people together in the same place (as witness NotCon).

Lisp news from me personally: not much. One of the ideas being thrown around for LSM this year is that between, around and during the formal presentations (but only during the boring ones) we attempt less formal "lightning" presentations of 5-10 minutes to explain to the assembled masses what we're doing or what we think they should be doing, or where we have points of issue to give everyone the necessary background to debate it meaningfully. The current list has me down to explain why you should package your projects with asdf and asdf-install, and Rudi Schlatte talking about simple-streams; I think we'll also be trying to co-opt Tim Moore to explain enough of CLIM to the world that we can brainstorm what should happen when there are multiple apps in one image, and I'm pretty sure Christophe Rhodes wanted to argue with someone about floating point.

My "hack hemlock" idea there seems to have veered off track a bit; the more I thought about it the more fun it seemed it would be to start from scratch and then start stealing and retrofitting code from Hemlock and other places after I had a basic set of sensible abstractions to fit them into. And I know that any project that starts with Hemlock is going to be subject to Robert Strandh asking "why aren't you using flexichains", whereas with a from-scratch design I can just leave the buffer abstraction, well, abstract. For the moment. Anyway, you heard it here first: rinse is no substitute for emacs. Not now and quite possibly not ever, even if I do get it to a usable state; I'm designing an editor I want to use, and if nobody else likes it, too bad. There's no code yet, but it'll be in telent cvs as soon as there is.

Non-Lisp news: last weekend I went on an "introduction to climbing" course at the local climbing wall, thus demonstrating beyond all doubt that my shoulder is better. Yesterday it was not aching any more than my other shoulder, back or forearms were, and the bruising has finally disappeared too. So, sometime in the next few days I need to wander back to Mile End and spend some more time hanging onto things by my fingertips (and upside down from the ceiling).