Nick Levine of Ravenbrook ran a SPA Cambridge session on Common Lisp closures and macros the other night. We had around 25 people with varying levels of Lisp experience from using it a little in EMACS to programming with it for around 20 years so Nick had his work cut out for him to pitch the talk at the right level.

The session began with a quick look at Common Lisp syntax and the read-eval-print loop. We motored on to building some simple functions and then closures before looking at macro definition and macro expansion. Nick used the example of a simple progress bar wrapper to show some of the power of macros as well as some of the potential gotchas. Unfortunately we didn’t have time to look at the XHTML generator example Nick also had but I feel we achieved quite a lot. Nick has taught Common Lisp in 12 weeks, 1 week, 1 day, but never before in 1 hour so he can be pleased with the results.

Nick’s notes for the event, including source code, pointers to Lisp resources, and some book recommendations are available here.

Nick is also organising 2007’s International Lisp Conference which will take place here in Cambridge, England from 1st - 4th April.