abstract.txt

Title: Scripting your Go code, an introduction to zygomys, an object-oriented modern Lisp
Speaker: Jason E. Aten, Ph.D.
Affiliation: Betable.com, San Francisco, CA.

The free and open-source programming language Go, helmed by a team from
Google, offers fast compilation, static-typing, and a multicore-oriented
programming environment that produces fast binaries from easy-to-maintain
code.

What Go has lacked is an integrated scripting language -- one that is
equally multicore friendly and portable -- to provide extendable
configuration and dynamic scripting.

Complex programs and changing business and customer requirements demand
complex and frequently changing configuration. This leads to non-standard
and hard-to-extend control languages, little wheels that get invented again
and again.

Designed for scripting Go programs, zygomys is a modern incarnation of
Lisp for the Go platform. It is open source at
https://github.com/glycerine/zygomys under a permissive 2-clause BSD
license. Written in 100% Go (no CGO required!), zygomys makes it
easy to dynamically control compiled code. zygomys automatically maps
Lisp records to nested Go structures, including structs and slices that
contain Go interfaces. Should scripts become large, zygomys makes it
easy to translate a piece of script code into compiled Go code to
optimize execution.

In this talk I will start with an introduction to Lisp for beginners.
Audience members will quickly understand the strange looking but
actually extremely simple S-expression syntax at the heart of Lisp.
Then for intermediate audience members, I will give an overview of
zygomys and highlight the design points that give it a modern
Object-oriented feel while retaining the power of
'programs-that-write-programs' that Lisp is famous for.

Continuing for the intermediate level audience and touching on
advanced points, I will show how to extend the capabilities of the
base interpreter to call your own compiled Go methods, and how to
use zygomys to produce a domain-specific-language (DSL) to drive
your application with a principled and reusable scripting language.

To quote Paul Graham of Y-combinator/Hackernews:

"Sometimes, in desperation, competitors would try to
introduce features that we didn't have. But with Lisp
our development cycle was so fast that we could
sometimes duplicate a new feature within a day or
two of a competitor announcing it in a press
release. By the time journalists covering the
press release got round to calling us, we would
have the new feature too."
 -- http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html