[Israel.pm] Previous Meeting Report and the Next Meeting

[Shlomi Fish]

Hi all!

I'd like to thank Ran for giving a very fun presentation on the last meeting 
(on Sunday). It took longer than expected but was still fun. Also thanks to 
all the people who came to the meeting and especially the people who stayed 
for the café.

Now someone should write a report. I wrote most of the reports for the last 
meeting, but would rather give someone else the honour today. Any volunteers? 

Note that I can easily publish reports by more than one person on the site.

Otherwise, for the next meeting (which we don't have a final date yet), there 
have been several suggestions:

1. The presentation I didn't end up giving or any of the other suggestions 
here:

http://wiki.perl.org.il/index.php/Ideas_for_Presentations

I am ready to give the presentation next month, but it probably (and 
hopefully) won't fill up an entire meeting. Does anyone else have another 
suggestion in mind?

2. An introduction to Lisp for Perl hackers. I can help prepare the 
presentation, but would prefer that someone else gives it, because I'm not 
such a good speaker.

That put aside, there remains the choice of Lisp dialect to give. Emacs Lisp 
will not be suitable because it uses dynamic scoping instead of lexical 
scoping. Common Lisp is also probably not suitable because it's positively 
huge, very complicated and not as clean as other dialects.

Scheme and Arc seems like better choices. Scheme is more minimalistic and 
verbose than Arc is, and suffers from the proliferation of different, 
incopmatible implementations. Arc is a new dialect which is clean, brief, and 
fun, but has some problems and missing functionality. For example, I don't 
think it has an object system.

My current idea for a good presentation format would be to show a Perl example 
and then show the equivalent in Lisp (starting from the "Hello World", etc.). 
So this will assume good knowledge of Perl or at least the ability to read 
Perl code.

However, the main issue remains whether someone here volunteers to present the 
talk instead of me.

Regards,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish      shlomif at iglu.org.il
Homepage:        http://www.shlomifish.org/

I'm not an actor - I just play one on T.V.