It's been almost two years since my last article in the Lisp category and although I gave it a good beating last time I approached the subject, well! I must admit, I haven't done it out of spite for the language. Quite the contrary in fact, I did it out of love and very much despite any flaws I might have found in this particular piece of software. No, I did not simply abandon this line of study, although it has taken a seat in a corner of my life that I don't have as much energy to explore as I did back in ye olden days.
Reviewing the subject, I decided out of sheer curiosity to check who else in my geographical area is (still) preoccupied with Common Lisp, or why not, Lisps in general. Some years ago, in my Haskell days, I used to attend what were then a bunch of regular meetings under the so-called umbrella of "Bucharest FP". Meanwhile that group seems to have died, or perhaps it has merely fallen asleep for the moment, I don't really know for I haven't kept in touch with the folks there. Besides that, I don't social media anymore, so I've lost touch with the other one or two Romanian-speaking folks who taught me how to CL ten years ago or so.
Thusly I decided to look further; and since I also don't give enough shits about the web in order to maintain an indexer, I resorted to search engines, or, in other words, to "google"1. I shall simply dump the results of my research -- circa June 2022 -- in the remainder of this article, so that I may have a future reference to this particular point.
The first somewhat meaningful resource that I've found is a Shithub aggregator2 with "Top Common Lisp developers in Romania" -- funnily enough, my own GitHub profile is nowhere to be found in that list, although an old copy of my Lisp blog scaffolding still lies on the platform. All of the so-called Common Lisp developers, save for one, are computer science students in Cluj who posted their labwork for a so-called "Functional and Logic Programming" course; while the other guy, also from Cluj, one Mihai Olteanu, also holds a blog and seems to be genuinely interested in the subject.
Looking further through the academic rabbit hole, I also find that the functional programming course over at Babes-Bolyai is taught by one Horia F. Pop, although I very much suspect that, much like the course at Politehnica București, this one is just a gateway towards lambdas in C++ and Java, or Rust or whatever they're using nowadays to code. These people were genuinely trying to push Lisps back in the 1990s -- I know Giumale was actively working on Lisp systems as far back as the '80s; but most likely you don't know that guy, so whatever -- but meanwhile, as engineering schools have turned into mere breeding grounds for "the industry", they've entirely succumbed to the pressures.
I've also found some academic material on Lisp over at the Politehnica in Timișoara, but overall I guess this pretty much sums up this first line of research.
Secondly, I have found an industrial gig going under the name of "KE-Works S.R.L." that claims to be developing CL-based CAD tools for aerospace engineering. To be honest, this sounds pretty cool, only the site footer reads "Copyright (c) 2011", so I don't quite know what to make of it. The founder of KE-Works, Teodor Gelu Chiciudean, has defected to the UK, while also maintaining a GitHub page, so... I don't know.
Finally, by far the most interesting Romanian (among others) Lisp resource that I've found is the site of one Dan Corlan, a researcher working, out of all places, at the local emergency hospital. Let's look at some of his projects: numerics for Ada; some medicine research software; a benchmark for various programming languages; a shell extension for CL; a bunch of TeX demos; a R to CL translator; a portable ECG; and... many, many others! His site is also quite old but otherwise in good shape, I'm just not sure how much time he spends on reading and writing Lisp nowadays.
And that is all, unfortunately; looking further, one may stumble upon some false positives such as Lisp implementations of Norvig's route-finding problem applied upon the map of Romania, but otherwise nothing.
I wouldn't read too much into the results tbh. If something is visibile on a search engine or on the interwebs in general, it's either because a) someone put some effort into doing some marketing or b) it happens to have natural emotional appeal. Tehnical merit is irrelevant. I'd bet you're likely to find 100 times more results for Romanians still programming in ZX Basic than in Lisp...
No, I agree, there aren't many humans left on the web. But what can I do...
> I'd bet you're likely to find 100 times more results for Romanians still programming in ZX Basic than in Lisp
I googled this out of curiosity and I found no more than three useful results:
- OLX posts: I've been following these for a while, some years ago people were selling HCs for a thousand euros, I kid you not;
- this guy, already knew him; and
- a site with links to ICE Felix specs in pdf format, hosted on Google Drive. Worth scraping, but otherwise not worth linking publicly.
Hunh, I really thought there'd be more. Still, just as the Lisp search missed your own repo, this search missed my own, albeit modest, efforts in the matter. Just goes to show, for truly niche stuff, web search just ain't no good. Developers who think they're making themselves visible by posting their work on a *-hub site because it's "social" are making a big mistake. Personal sites still beat *-hubs in visibility, it seems.
Otherwise, I was thinking that in a sense, your question is more interesting than the answer. Why would one be interested in Lisp afficionados in Romania specifically?
> Still, just as the Lisp search missed your own repo, this search missed my own, albeit modest, efforts in the matter
I did find it eventually, but only because you mentioned it. :) And I also found your old Z80 opcode guide in the process, I wonder why Google didn't place *that* on the front page.
Also, I looked at the World of Spectrum forums for a bit and the atmosphere looks eerily similar to what I'm seeing on the Lisp Discord (yes, there is one and I tried it out): a few hot threads regarding the news du jour, some low-traffic topics, but otherwise mostly ded. Are you still active there?
> Why would one be interested in Lisp afficionados in Romania specifically?
Assessing if (and if, how) this particular language/set of languages are used in this geographical area and perhaps making new friends in the process. I'm particularly interested in Common Lisp and particularly disinterested in Clojure and the other fashionable Lisp dialects. I wouldn't mind stumbling upon some fierce Schemers though.
Ah, World of Spectrum. Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time.
I used to be quite active there 15 years back or so. Then my attention was drawn to other interests and it seems with time the site and community have fallen on hard times, particularly after van der Heide retired. Tbh I actively avoid visiting it precisely because I dread being forced to confront the reality of decay. Like not wanting to rip off a bandaid for fear of seeing the festering, purulent wound beneath. Ahem. Well anyway, I know for a fact the Spectrum community is still quite active out there, it's just that they've moved on to other sites, possibly Zuccbook or some other hidey-holes. Perhaps the same is true for Lisp?
I think your mentioning "making friends in the process" gets closer to the heart of the matter - that is one goal where geographical proximity would be most relevant. Personally I'm a bit queasy about the idea of bonding with others over a programming language - over the years I've begun to believe software is one of those things one should maintain a hygienic emotional distance towards. But then again, friendship is just as inherently irrational as love, so maybe the specific things we bond over are just pretexts to allow the magic to happen anyway.
Do you think you might have the energy/time to more prominently showcase your case for Common Lisp on this site? Small projects, maybe even games, concrete code. Would do wonders for honeypotting the potentially interested, methinks.
I'm not sure there ever was a (Common) Lisp community out there, and if there was I missed it. I learned all my Lisp from folks who liked it (starting with Giumale's demos at the old uni) and by studying various codes ranging from great to awful. Anyways, at some point I understood that the various Lisp dialects (starting from McCarthy's initial design) are actually honest systems languages and that's what actually got me into them.
Sure, maybe bonding over a programming language is silly, but as the Dan Corlan example shows, some Lispers tend to have plurivalent interests, which makes them quite interesting folks to have around. I know this also sounded a bit silly, but I once met a guy who was using Common Lisp to process data on his astronomical observations over in the dark Romanian plains...
I'm not particularly interested in proselytising these days, but the lisp category on my blog has code ranging from good to awful, so I guess the interested have material to dig into. But rather than poke at my toys, I believe one'd be better introduced into this world by taking a look at the various lists of software that made it, I believe some of it is also publicly available.
It's not much better in the USA. I was once lounging around in a local university classroom, and a club meeting spontaneously formed around me after a few hours, and it happened to be a programming club of all things, fitting for a computer science classroom. I decided to ask around about Lisp, to ignorance, but was told to ask the club leader, a fat man, about it; he didn't know what Lisp was, but he enjoyed Python.
I suppose not in this Millennium there is, anyway. Part of what attracted me towards Lisp was the image of the solitary Lisp hacker, neither bound to others nor wanting them. Embrace it instead.
Methinks this image of the solitary Lisp hacker paints a rather romantic view of programming.
My first intersection (at least as far as I remember) with the field of programming occurred when I was about five or six, when my elder cousin from Mangalia masterfully drew the Chicago Bulls logo in Basic, on a Romanian ZX Spectrum clone. Then he would simply write the code down on a piece of paper to reproduce it later, since at least at the time, blank cassette tapes weren't that easy to find.
Meanwhile my cousin became a medic himself, which perhaps goes to show yet again that this so-called "job of programmer" (or hacker, or call it whatever you like) is a stupid conceit. One is no more a programmer than he is a cook or a plumber, one's gotta know how to do a bit of everything in this life, as my grandmother used to say.
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