Video: LA RubyConf Talk Up

Easy Node.js Apps With Lisp.

The talk analyzes hip-hop lyrics to explain why Lisp's parentheses are awesome.

Big thanks to Confreaks, especially since I kept them busy by hopping all over the stage(s).

Talk description:

Lisp is a programming language which allows you to manipulate its abstract syntax tree directly. The popular quote about every other language being a partial implementation of Lisp is not just snark; all programming languages use an abstract syntax tree, so Lisp is literally and mathematically either equal to, or a superset of, every other programming language. However, if you've wanted to build anything actually useful with Lisp, you've historically been in the position of having no vibrant, powerful open source community to draw on. Not many people enjoyed this tradeoff, but fortunately, it is no longer the case. Sibilant is a Lisp written on top of Node.js, a new server-side JavaScript library for writing servers. Node has an active open source community, and it runs on the lightning-fast V8 JavaScript interpreter (written and supported by Google). Thanks to V8, Node, and Sibilant, it is now trivially easy to write web servers, command-line utilities, and applications (server-side, client-side, or both) in a fast, well-supported Lisp. This talk will show you how.