TC Lispers (cons 'Minneapolis 'St-Paul)

I wrote an email to Mikel to thank him for his very interesting presentation at our last meeting.  In response, he writes:

Thanks for the opportunity to talk to folks there, and if anyone is interested in any of the stuff I'm working on, the Bywicket group (http://bywicket.com) is a friendly and welcoming batch of loosely-organized hackers who would love to have them aboard.

Mikel Evins will speak to us over iChat, the topic:  "The Confounded Contraption," a guide to designing and implementing Lisp.

The meeting will be at SIFT's offices downtown, and not at Common Roots, which means that we suggest brown-bagging your dinner (although snacks will be provided).

Location info here.

Next meeting will be on 22 February, and will be at the SIFT offices at 211 N. First Street in Minneapolis.  See http://www.sift.info.  The speaker, remotely over iChat, will be Mikel Evins.  Topic yet to be determined.

The March meeting is not yet scheduled, but will focus on Lisp-based (including Scheme and Clojure!) web frameworks.  Pradeep Bashyal is chairing.

At Robert's request I am posting a link to where you can download my Cocoa/Lisp tutorial document (see the "More Information" link below). To get all of the associated lisp code you will need to go to the CCL website. You can browse the code by going to http://trac.clozure.com/ccl/browser and then click successively on

trunk -> source -> contrib -> krueger

Here was my previous announcement:

For those of you who might have seen my talk at the last TCLispers meeting and are using CCL and would perhaps like to try things for yourself, here is an update.

I just committed a new contribution to the Clozure CCL repository (.../ccl/contrib/krueger). 

I've been going down a path of learning how to create Cocoa interfaces using Apple's Interface Builder (on Macs of course) and interfacing them to lisp. As I learned, I kept fairly detailed notes about what I learned and have incorporated that into a tutorial. I wanted to do something similar to what Aaron Hillegass did with his book "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" , but using Lisp as the interface language. The tutorial is included in the material that I submitted:

.../contrib/krueger/interfaceProjects/Documentation/InterfaceBuilderWithCCLTutorial.pdf

It's about 70 pages right now. It includes a preamble that describes my search for a user interface development methodology and why I ended up taking the path that I did. I'd be happy to send this directly to anyone who would prefer to see that before going to the trouble of getting an update.

At this point I have committed seven test projects and have a few more planned for the near future. They can all be run immediately under a vanilla CCL IDE without interfering with it in any way. You might want to glance at the tutorial to see how I set up ccl-init.lisp to make that fairly easy to do and for instructions on how to run the examples. I specifically wanted to avoid having to create stand-alone executables in order to use my interfaces although I didn't want to preclude that either.

I'd be happy to get corrections or other comments.

Paul