(2010-12-08) Bowkett Nodejs Sibilant Lisp

Giles Bowkett is giving a talk on NodeJs. Lisp is a programming language which allows you to manipulate its abstract syntax tree directly. The popular quote about every other language being a partial implementation of Lisp is not just snark; all programming languages use an abstract syntax tree, so Lisp is literally and mathematically either equal to, or a superset of, every other programming language. However, if you've wanted to build anything actually useful with Lisp, you've historically been in the position of having no vibrant, powerful Open Source community to draw on. Not many people enjoyed this tradeoff, but fortunately, it is no longer the case. Sibilant is a Lisp written on top of NodeJs, a new server-side JavaScript library for writing servers. Node has an active open source community, and it runs on the lightning-fast V8 JavaScript interpreter (written and supported by Google). Thanks to V8, Node, and Sibilant, it is now trivially easy to write web servers, command-line utilities, and applications (server-side, client-side, or both) in a fast, well-supported Lisp. This talk will show you how. There may be slides. There will definitely be GitHubs.