Dear Chickeneers, with the workshop having been yesterday I thought I'd report back on how it went. First of all I'd like to thank the CCC Cologne for providing the space and equipment for the workshop, it's always nice to be a guest in your rooms. Also thanks to all participants for attending despite the very nice weather -- I was a bit afraid that I'd spend the afternoon with only one or two people but after all about 15 showed up which was even more than I expected!
I started the meeting by giving an introductionary talk about Lisp and its history which took about an hour (the slides are available at http://moritz.twoticketsplease.de/files/lisp.pdf). Afterwards I encouraged everyone to try for themselves what was heard before. Most people chose Chicken as their Lisp since that was what I presented and I could offer the most substantial help for, of course :-) This mostly went very well and I could resolve most issues that arose (we even managed to get Chicken running on a Windows 7 machine with the help of the excellent chicken-iup installer). A few people were inclined to give Emacs a try after I quickly demonstrated how paredit and SLIME integration really help writing parenthesized code. One thing almost every participant wondered about was that csi didn't provide readline support out of the box. Installing and configuring the readline egg is easy (although we had serious trouble to install libreadline on one of the OS X machines, evantually gave up and just went with the linenoise egg) but it seems to be considered common-place and in fact most other interactive interpreters come with some readline-like support by default. Maybe it's worth investigating what could be done about that at the Chicken Weekend! After a while everyone was up and running and started hacking away: familiarizing themselves with the syntax, trying to port some code they had written in other languages, solving Project Euler problems etc. The test egg was enjoyed by a few attendees and some even gave coops a spin (I pointed them to Christian's excellent introductionary article about it at http://pestilenz.org/~ckeen/blog/posts/oo-in-scheme.html which did quite a good job of explaining the basic concepts). I had the general impression that most people really tried to understand what I was trying to present at the beginning - what is so special about Lisp and why it is so much fun to program. After 5 hours of hacking and some intensive discussion I was pretty exhausted; but seeing that it seemed to have caught on for at least some participants more than made up for it :-) Some people approached me to institute some kind of Lisp user group for meeting regularly which I am seriously considering. More on that soon! Also, I got invited to hold the workshop again at the CCC FFM (https://ccc-ffm.de/) in the near future. I'll let you know if and when. Thanks for the invitation! Also, if anyone would like to do something like this in their area, feel free to contact me about it and/or re-use my presentation material! All the best Moritz _______________________________________________ Chicken-users mailing list Chicken-users@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/chicken-users