Re: Practical Lisp: What are you working on, really?

From: Andre Koehorst (a.koehorst_at_ll.unimaas.nl)
Date: 11/04/04 

Date: Thu, 4 Nov 2004 22:15:45 +0100

Most of the replies I have seen in this thread are from professional
developers who do plenty of coding. I am not. I am working as
consultant/project manager/researcher, not as a programmer. In this job the
need to do some programming will pop up occasionally, be it a week or six
months from now. I neither have the time nor the intention to learn the ins
and outs of a new programming language every two or three years. Lisp has
been my trusty computational Swiss army knife for the last 15 or so years.
Besides a few larger projects (like a web based course management system, a
shell for web-based patient management problems and a web based tool for
collaborative writing) I use it for quick hacks and prototyping.

Right now I feel we are loosing too much time in our projects on hand coding
java scripts to test forms. The prototype I am currently working on is a
proof of concept tool that uses form and field CLOS objects to generate html
forms and form processing methods including tests on constraints on the
individual fields and constraints between fields. The prototype should
include client side tests in java script as well as server side tests and
generate meaningful error messages on ALL violations at once, not just the
first one on the form, any time the user tries to send in the form.

The last time Lisp saved my life was early this summer, when I promised a
colleague to have somebody create reports for about 350 students that
graphically informed them about their progress on group working skills over
a period of time. The students' data on these skills turned out to be locked
up in more than 1000 html-pages (don't ask.) and the reports had to be
generated in Excel. This task involved writing a parser to extract the data
from the html pages, accumulating them per student, writing the data per
student to Excel to generate a file that included several graphs and saving
that file under the id-number of that student. When asking around for a
solution I was informed that this would be a complex and risky project that
would involve some serious time/money that I could not allocate. To keep the
promise this ended up being an enjoyable two or three night lisp project
using existing connection and html-parsing libraries.

> ps I'm looking for inspiration here.

For inspiration: in jobs that involve systems administration, development or
data processing, you'll encounter challenges that other people think of as
(too) complex, (too) time consuming, inevitable problems or impossible
solutions. Lisp programming skills will give you career-lasting
opportunities to have a good time proving them wrong or convincing yourself
that they are right. And as a bonus your successes will get you ample of
opportunities to hone your social skills.

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