[Gardeners] YAHG (Yet Another Hello Gardeners)

[Larry Clapp]

Hello, Gardeners.

My background: Started programming in BASIC on a TRS-80 Color Computer
at the local Radio Shack at the tender age of 15, in the mid 1980's.
(Sign me up for Resident Old Fart.  :)  Gradually progressed through
Pascal, a little Lisp (not Common Lisp), C, a little APL, Korn shell,
Perl, a little C++, and Java.  In my current day job, I hack Perl for
IBM for a Tivoli client.

3-or-so years ago I read Kent Pitman's interview on Slashdot and got
back into Lisp, after having drooled over it in the 80's.  Have read
Peter's excellent book (paid for it, too! :), AMOP, and some other
good Lisp books.  Haven't done a whole lot of Lisp programming, but
would like to change that.  (I also use Vim rather than Emacs for my
Lisping, which makes me fairly rare (but: Hi, Brad!).)

As a non-language-based interest, I'm interested in Test Driven
Development and automated unit testing.

As a non-computer-related interest (sort of :) I'm interested in
writing some software that can make me some money (see also "Paul
Graham" :)  I mention this only in the interest of completeness and as
background for what comes next, to wit:

I have observed that most ;) profitable computer programs interact
with the user in some way, and lately do it via a Graphical User
Interface.  So I'm interested in GUIs for Lisp, too.  I've played
around a bit with LTK and like it a lot, and think it'd go a long way
towards a light-weight, portable GUI.

So, to get to the point: combining my interest in TDD and GUIs, I
think a neat project (for me, at least, and others if they want to
help) would be to implement a GUI in LTK for a Lisp unit-test
framework, a-la JUnit.  I've looked at several, and I like clos-unit
and/or xlunit the best.  (I got into TDD via Java & JUnit, and
clos-unit implements the xUnit protocol for Lisp; this[1] page claims
that xlunit supersedes clos-unit.)

I think, in general, that just about any software (Lisp or otherwise)
benefits both just from having automated unit tests, and from the
refactoring required to test just one little part of the API and no
more.  Ergo, I will also make so bold as to recommend that, if you
can't think of any other way to contribute to this project (unlikely
though that may be for most of you :), download some random
ASDF-installable package and start writing some test cases for it.

(One could argue the merits of TDD in a Lisp application, and indeed I
would happily discuss it, but I think c.l.l would be a more
appropriate forum, so if you'd like to talk about that, let's do it
there.)

Anyway: Hi, everybody!

-- Larry

[1] http://www.cliki.net/clos-unit