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Arc Conference
10 points by jazzdev 5159 days ago | 18 comments
Would you be interested in attending an Arc Conference?

If so, please reply with answers to the following questions:

1. Where would you be willing to travel to?

2. What presentations would you like to hear?

3. Is there anything you would like to present?

4. Does it have to be any particular time of the year for you to be able to attend?

5. Any additional comments are welcome too, of course.



5 points by rntz 5158 days ago | link

1. Silicon Valley.

2. Anything.

3. Why pattern matching is way cooler than car/cdr; why arc isn't a 100-year language; comparative study of macro systems; comparative study of module systems; implementation of a bootstrapping arc compiler; implementation of my pet lisp, chao, which is bootstrapped from arc and compiles to a (hopefully) portable IL... I have lots of ideas.

4. Summer break, since that's when I'm in Silicon Valley.

5. If someone wanted to destroy Arc as a language, this would be the time for them to do it. Everyone interested, gathered in one small space. Be on your guard, comrades! :P

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1 point by d0m 5154 days ago | link

I mostly agree with 3! It might be a good place to finally take the decision about the module system.. It obviously would be awesome if it could be webcasted. (Montreal, Canada here :p)

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4 points by projectileboy 5159 days ago | link

I would be excited to attend, but with the size of this community, I don't think you'd have a conference; I think you'd have a dinner party.

  1) U.S.
  2) Why care about Arc (esp. relative to Clojure)?
     Future direction(s)
     Lessons learned, and the applicability of those lessons to other languages
     Applications (e.g., Jarc on Google App Engine)
  3) Maybe... But I'm really more of a dilettante than a hardcore hacker.
  4) Spring is best, but it doesn't really matter

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2 points by fallintothis 5157 days ago | link

1. Well, my answer is some odd amalgamation of the other responses. I've been quite busy, will be for the foreseeable future (on the order of a couple years), and Silicon Valley (a common consensus here) is a little too out of my way for a "dinner party", so I almost certainly wouldn't be showing up. Besides being in the same boat as shader wrt the funds and transportation. But it's an interesting idea, so here it goes.

2. Code for Code. What tools facilitate the actual process of programming, and how are those tools themselves programmed? I don't mean this in too broad a sense, like any ol' API or library for frobnicating your database or querying some widget. It's more like "developer tools", though that doesn't sound very zazzy. In the sense I mean, it covers language implementations and compilers, which are certainly very interesting, but also many more things we use that no one seems to get nearly as excited over. REPL tools, syntax highlighters, debuggers, profilers, code introspection, pretty printing, documentation systems, software testing (randomized à la QuickCheck, unit testing, whatever), type systems, bug tracking, ... the list goes on. It starts getting increasingly tangential (e.g., if we count text editors, do we slippery-slope ourselves into counting entire operating systems?). You probably get the gist, though.

My interest is independent from Arc -- or any language, for that matter. I had to learn Vimscript to make a halfway decent highlighter, for instance. But it's the sort of thing I don't think we hear enough about, since we get used either to having these tools or just doing without. So, how do we make programs for programmers, and what kind should we make? How novel can we get?

3. Moot point per 1, but I could talk about some of the work I've done along the lines of 2.

4. February 31. Everyone will be free that day. ;)

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1 point by shader 5157 days ago | link

I agree, Code for Code was pretty much what I was looking for as well. I think I like lisp mainly because I can actually work on metaprogramming topics easily and without straying too far from the code itself. Arc doubly so, since the language definition is so short.

Oh, and I don't have anything scheduled for Feb. 31 either ;)

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3 points by shader 5158 days ago | link

An arc conference would be fascinating, but as I lack funds and any independent means of transportation, I can't really go anywhere.

Would it be possible to do some sort of webcast teleconference? That would make it a lot easier for some of us immobile/distant community members.

To answer the other questions:

2. Same as everyone else - learn more about alternate implementations of arc, with an eye towards doing one myself.

3. I don't have that much to talk about, but I might be interested in talking about self-documenting code and interactive programming.

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4 points by akkartik 5158 days ago | link

This seemed relevant: http://redlinernotes.com/blog/?p=1252

"An ideal future Lisp conference for me, personally, would … attract hundreds of cheerful and enthusiastic Lisp nerds…Navel-gazing and nostalgia would be at a minimum. People would talk about what they’re doing today and what exciting things they plan for the future. Everyone would get together at dinner and swap stories about Lisp, life, and whatever else came to mind."

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1 point by rocketnia 5159 days ago | link

1. Where would you be willing to travel to?

I haven't even managed to get out to local Meetup groups I'm signed up for, so probably nowhere. If there's a small miracle, I could probably go anywhere in the Silicon Valley, but anywhere else would take a bigger miracle. ^_^

2. What presentations would you like to hear?

Whatever there happen to be, really. I suppose I'm most interested in ways people think Arc could be improved from the ground up. Between Semi-Arc and the custom Arcs of aw and akkartik, there's been a lot of that kind of thinking around here lately.

3. Is there anything you would like to present?

Ooh, I'd probably do a talk about useful Arc design patterns I've found that seem to be too succinct to fit into the "build a macro for it" zone. I don't know how far that would take me, though. ^_^ So then I'd talk about various projects I'd done, I suppose.

4. Does it have to be any particular time of the year for you to be able to attend?

The time probably doesn't matter for me, just 'cause I'm unlikely to attend. Weekends would be more accommodating though. :-p

5. Any additional comments are welcome too, of course.

IMO, we tend to communicate pretty freely on this forum. If it's not enough, how about IRC or something?

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1 point by waterhouse 5141 days ago | link

I'd be delighted to meet you guys in person.

1. Silicon Valley.

2. I'm specifically interested in making Arc (or Lisp in general) a good option for doing everything that you'll ever need to do. I think making games is a good thing to aim for: it's worth doing in itself (I like games, and there's one old no-longer-being-developed game I'd really like to implement myself), and it implies handling graphics, audio, and keyboard/mouse input, plus respectable execution speed. Seems either one could focus on the Racket libraries (I've found them pretty good but somewhat buggy and slow), learn to use the Racket FFI, or use Arc as a skin over a completely new platform or language. I'd be pleased to hear of progress in these domains. Any other topics are good too, though.

3. I could talk about various things I've done in Arc, and the ad hoc libraries I've constructed in the process. In the category of math, I'll quickly mention primality testing, modular exponentiation and inversion, prime factorization, polynomial arithmetic and interpolation, multiple-variable polynomial arithmetic, and integer nth roots of arbitrarily large real and complex integers.

4. Nope.

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1 point by akkartik 5141 days ago | link

I'd be delighted to meet you especially, waterhouse. I've spoken with most of the regulars offline, but you've always seemed kinda 'mysterious' :)

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2 points by jazzdev 5155 days ago | link

Seems like a dinner gathering on a weekend in the Spring or Summer in Silicon Valley might work.

How about Sunday June 19th or Sunday June 26th? Maybe 6pm?

I'm just picking some dates around the beginning of Summer as a starting point.

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1 point by jazzdev 5159 days ago | link

1. Where would you be willing to travel to?

Anywhere in North America (US, Canada, Mexico). Maybe Europe...

2. What presentations would you like to hear?

I'd like to learn more about Lathe, Rainbow, Semi-Arc and it would be interesting to hear pg talk about lessons learned from Arc so far.

3. Is there anything you would like to present?

I'd be happy to talk about Jarc (why I did it, what I've learned, etc.)

4. Does it have to be any particular time of the year for you to be able to attend?

Nope.

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1 point by conanite 5159 days ago | link

an arc conference would be très cool

1. Anywhere; Europe is more convenient

2. What should the core language be; macro design; libraries; implementations and interopability

3. I hope I can think of something to say about rainbow

4. no

5. as projectileboy mentions, we would need to find a conference space large enough to fit ... a dozen people?

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1 point by evanrmurphy 5147 days ago | link

1. Silicon Valley or some city in Texas would be best for me. I could possibly attend somewhere else in North America, but going further than that would be beyond my means.

2. Anything!

3. I might like to talk about web-based REPLs, compiling Arc to JavaScript or some related topic.

4. Any time of year is fine, but can we do it over a weekend rather than during the week?

5. Sorry for the tardy response!

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1 point by garply 5158 days ago | link

I would love to meet you all in person, but I'm in Asia and will be for the next few years. I'll probably only drop by SV very sporadically.

I am in favor of this type of stuff though - seems like it would be a good way to promote the community.

Speaking of remote conferencing, do we even have an IRC channel?

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2 points by shader 5157 days ago | link

Yes, I believe it's at irc.freenode.net #arc. Unfortunately, it's generally pretty inactive.

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1 point by aw 5159 days ago | link

1. SV

2. happy to see what happens

3. I'd probably give a useful talk (such as, calling libraries in other languages from Arc), and, if there's time, a fun talk (the extraordinary elegance of parsing by matching)

4. No.

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1 point by SteveMorin 5123 days ago | link

Jazzdev what's your email?

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