On Apr 22, 2006, at 12:29 PM, Pablo Barenbaum wrote: > I had the idea that some kind of "Lisp contest" could be > good for getting the community together. > > The rest is left as an exercise to the interested reader. ;-)
So I was thinking along similar lines recently, though not of a contest specifically. My thought was that we should have a CL Gardeners' Plant a Flower Day. The idea would be that we'd pick a specific day, probably on a weekend, and anyone who wants to participate would write, on that day, a small Lisp program that does something neat. These programs would be like flowers--not big gardening projects designed to Save Lisp, but small ornaments for the Lisp garden. I'm just making this up as I go along but here are some possible rules: - You can use any libraries you want but they must be included in your submission. - You must specify what Lisp implementations and OS's your program is known to run on. Entries should be submitted as either tar.gz or .zip files that unpack into a single directory whose name is your name. In that directory, at the top level you should provide a single file, load.lisp, that can be loaded from the CL-USER package via LOAD to load/compile your program and any libraries. If you use ASDF (recommended) to load your code and its libraries, you can use this file to set up the ASDF:*CENTRAL-REGISTRY* before invoking ASDF:OPERATE. Also in the top-level directory should be a plain text file named README or README.txt that explains any other details needed to run the program (e.g. if the program needs to be configured in any way, this is where you'd explain how to do it.) If folks are interested, I'll pick a date and set up something on the lispniks.com web site for submitting and reviewing entries. If we want to make it a contest, I'd say we should have it be a popularity contest, in the good sense. That is, after the entry day, we'll have a couple weeks where all subscribers to the Gardeners' list can vote for their favorite flowers. Prizes will be virtual--the recognition of one's peers and a notice on lispniks.com of the winners. The point is to give everybody a good excuse to do a bit of Lisp hacking and to share gardening tips. -Peter P.S. I realize there's nothing to stop folks from working for more than one day on their program and I won't even say that that's against the rules. But the spirit of the thing is that these flowers should be small hacks, not major projects. Keep in mind that your fellow gardeners are not going to vote for your flower if they have to slog through 40,000 lines of code. -- Peter Seibel * [EMAIL PROTECTED] Gigamonkeys Consulting * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/ Practical Common Lisp * http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
