Two personal stories related to Lisp

Story #1

Autumn of 2007. I was giving a series of Lisp sessions for some second year students.

The students were surprisingly good, and it got me thinking: the problem facing almost any software company is how to have good developers. They (i.e the good companies) usually solve it in two parts:

1. Set up an attractive environment for developers
2. Set up good interviews to differentiate good developers from bad

Now for this question: What if, instead of searching for good developers, we began making them?

What if someone formed a company with two sides: a production side and an academic side. The employees in this company would have double duties: To produce and sell great software, and to transfer their knowledge and experience to a newer generation of smart students.

And they would be sincere in it: They would not give sessions that are actually hidden advertisement for their products. They would not force students to join the company or to take training therein; no: their primary academic goal would be to foster an environment of learning and raise as many great programmers as possible. Even if not all of those programmers join us, the end result would be a better market and an academic scene where science and skills are everyone's goal. In the end, we'd still benefit one way or another.

Since 2007 this has been the company I'm trying to form.

Story #2

I created a Lisp-like language in 2008, called Ayka. (You thought Kalimat was the only language I made?).



It was intended to be a part of a larger project called "Mira", but that project has stopped. The language was written in C# and Ayka programs could use the .net libraries. It had its own simple IDE and wrappers for the Winforms GUI library:



It also had those features:

• Support for "defmacro" style Lisp macros
• Support for full continuations via trampolines
• The ability to create dynamic web pages
  

I was an amateur language implementer at the time (actually, I still am), so the project wasn't really mature: The language was slow, the libraries were buggy, things were falling apart, so I stopped working on Ayka and moved on to other projects. I learned a lot from it though, and it influenced my work on Kalimat --mainly by telling me what mistakes to avoid.

Still, from time to time, I wonder if the project could be revived. I also wonder if those sessions should be given again...