MSLUG Meetings http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/mslug-meetings-feed en MSLUG Meeting announcements Scheme for the Novice http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/27 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/27

This talk is intended as a tutorial on Scheme that will also expand on more advanced uses of the language and of the Gambit-C implementation of Scheme.

 Wed, 27 Mar 2008 19:00:00 +0000 Beer and discussions http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/26 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/26 The next meeting of the MSLUG will take place as usual on a Wednesday, at Pub Ste-Elisabeth at 7pm.

We'll be upstairs, on the indoor terrace.

See you on Wednesday! Tue, 23 Jan 2008 19:00:00 +0000 Commercial Users of Scheme and Lisp http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/25 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/25 Houman Zolfaghari : Using scheme in the industry: a possibly powerful but difficult choice

Having used scheme/lisp for more than 12 years in the industry for some large scale projects, I will talk a bout my experience and my latest considerations and conclusions.

Dominique Boucher : Scheme in the enterprise: pitfalls to avoid

In this short presentation, I will share my experience introducing Scheme in an industrial setting. I will mainly focus on how to avoid some common pitfalls.


Daniel Villeneuve & Alain Marcotte : Three goals, 2 companies, 1 ...

Overview of 3 utilizations of scheme in two different companies where scheme is part of delivered products. A glance at the architecture and environment for those products.

Guillaume Cartier : Anyone called for the doctor?

Overview of the Chyma Scheduler, a rule-based scheduler for hospitals written for IsaiX Technologies using JazzScheme under its new open source license.

I will also discuss how it has been possible for us on various occasions to help clients with Lisp based solutions when the hurt was considerable and Lisp was seen as the only doctor with potent enough medicine. Tue, 05 Dec 2007 19:00:00 +0000 Hop and ContextL http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/24 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/24 The October meeting will take place during the OOPSLA 2007 conference. For this special event, the MSLUG invited two well-known speakers: Manuel Serrano and Pascal Costanza. Don't miss this exceptional event!

Where: UQAM, 100 Sherbrooke West, Room SU-1550
When: October 22nd, 2007 at 7h30PM


Manuel Serrano, INRIA Sophia-Antipolis

Manuel Serrano holds a Ph.D. degree from the Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), France, and works at INRIA Sophia-Antipolis as a research director. Most of his research activities are based, or use, the functional programming language Scheme. He is well-known for his highly-optimizing Scheme compiler, Bigloo. Manuel Serrano served on several international conferences: ICFP, JFLA, Scheme workshops, and more.

Title: Programming Multimedia Applications on the Web with HOP

Hop is a language dedicated to programming reactive and dynamic applications for the web, such as web agendas, web galleries, web mail clients, etc. In this presentation, we highlight the linguistic novelties introduced by Hop and its execution environment by describing Hop's user libraries, its extensions to the HTML-based standards, and its execution platform, the Hop web broker. The presentation will focus on presenting the development on multimedia applications with Hop. There will be several live demonstrations during the presentation.


Pascal Costanza, Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

Pascal Costanza has a Ph.D. degree from the University of Bonn, Germany, and works as a research assistant at the Programming Technology Lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. His past involvements include specification and implementation of the languages Gilgul and Lava, and the design and application of the JMangler framework for load-time transformation of Java class files. He has also implemented ContextL, the first programming language extension for Context-oriented Programming based on CLOS, and aspect-oriented extensions for CLOS. He has also co-organized numerous workshops on Unanticipated Software Evolution, Aspect-Oriented Programming, Object Technology for Ambient Intelligence, Lisp, and redefinition of computing.

Title: Context-oriented Programming in ContextL

There is an increased need for context-aware applications that can dynamically adjust their behavior to the context of their use. Two years ago, we have introduced ContextL, our first programming language extension that explicitly supports Context-oriented Programming (COP), based on the Common Lisp Object System (CLOS). In COP, programs consist of partial class and method definitions that can be selected and combined at runtime as needed. Employing runtime adaptations to class and method definitions, COP does not only allow expressing context-aware behavior, but encourages continually adjusting behavior
of programs according to their context.

In my presentation, I will show and discuss the following.
  • The basic language constructs of ContextL.
  • The development of non-trivial examples.
  • The current state of the art in COP: language extensions, example applications and support for the various stages in software development.
  • Future work: promising next steps that several researchers in our own groups and elsewhere are currently undertaking.
 Sun, 22 Oct 2007 19:00:00 +0000 SchemeCamp 1 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/23 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/23 This meeting will be our first "SchemeCamp", an event based on the popular BarCamp/DemoCamp events. Each presentation lasts about 15-20 minutes.

The following presentations are scheduled this week:

Christopher Diggins - A translator from Scheme to a statically-typed functional stack-based language.

Étienne Bergeron - A "JIT Synthesizer", i.e. a runtime system that produces FPGA configurations instead of machine code.

Adrien Piérard - Adrien will talk about his Master's Thesis (details to come).

David St-Hilaire - Design and implementation of a Tetris game. Tue, 29 Aug 2007 19:00:00 +0000 Snow by example http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/22 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/22 Snow is a general framework for developing and distributing portable Scheme packages. Currently Snow packages can be run on a dozen of the most popular Scheme implementations including Bigloo, Chez, Chicken, Gambit, Gauche, Guile, Kawa, MzScheme, Scheme48, SCM, Scsh, and STklos. The repository contains packages for networking, cryptography, data compression, parsing, data structures, etc. In this talk I will present the main features of the Snow framework and explain briefly how the framework is implemented. Several examples will be given. Wed, 24 May 2007 19:00:00 +0000 How (and why) I implemented the MSLUG website in Erlang http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/21 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/21 In this talk, I will present how I implemented the MSLUG website in Erlang. We will see how, in about 1K lines of Erlang code, one can implement a high-performance, fully-dynamic website with RSS feeds, database support, and more. The talk will cover the basic aspects of Erlang (its syntax, the read-eval-print loop, etc.) as well as more advanced features: Mnesia, the concurrent distributed database, the high performance web server Yaws, and OTP.

Note that this will be a very informal meeting, with lots of code. The goal is to show why I consider Erlang to be mostly a member of the Lisp family, even with its Prolog-like syntax ;-)

Dominique Boucher is a senior developer and consultant at Nü Echo, a company that specializes in the development of speech-enabled applications for large call centers. Wed, 19 Apr 2007 19:00:00 +0000 Adventures in Open Source Erlang http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/20 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/20 When my blog posts about Erlang started receiving attention on reddit.com, I realized that my claims that Erlang could be a great web development language weren't compelling enough in the absence of a web develpment framework. This, together with my personal needs, lead me to create ErlyWeb, an open source web development framework for Erlang. In this presentation, I will talk about my discovery of Erlang, the development of ErlyWeb, and why I think Erlang's popularity will grow in the future. Tue, 17 Jan 2007 19:00:00 +0000 JazzScheme, an open-source development platform based on Scheme http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/19 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/19 As some may already know, MetaScoop recently announced it will be releasing its Jazz platform as an open source project under the JazzScheme name. In this presentation, I will talk about and also give a live demonstration of the JazzScheme platform. To finish, I will present an overview of Fusion, an ongoing project of porting the Jazz Kernel from C++ to Scheme that will make the Jazz language, Scheme compliant and multi-platform. Tue, 13 Dec 2006 19:00:00 +0000 Factor: a non-trivial stack language http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/18 http://schemeway.dyndns.org/mslug/meeting/18 I will start with a quick overview of key language features found in Factor (higher-order functions, generic functions, continuations, code-as-data...), and how they relate to abstractions you know and love from Common Lisp and Scheme. I will attempt to explain the philosophy of programming with a stack. I will then talk about the architecture of the Factor compiler, which implements some interesting optimizations I developed which are specific to stack-based languages. Finally I will give an overview of the Factor user interface framework. The presentation slides will actually be displayed by a Factor program running on my laptop (with PDF dumps as backup), and I will be able to do a little bit of live coding (assuming my software doesn't fail horribly). Tue, 22 Nov 2006 19:00:00 +0000