- First name: Laughing 
  
- Last name: Water 
  
- Email address: REMOVED
  
- Phone number(s): (406)443-5150 work 
  
- Postal code: 59601 
  
- City: Helena 
  
- State or province: Montana 
  
- Country: USA 
  
- Organization(s) you work for or study at 
  (please supply the name and city for each organization): 
Real Food Market & Deli, Inc. 
Helena, MT 
  
- Fields of interest 
  (e.g. computer linguistics, numerical analysis, business software, 
   medicine, bioinformatics): 
Natural language programming and user interfaces 
Business software 
  
- Have you written any Lisp-related papers? If so, please supply 
  bibliographical references (and URL's, if possible). 
  
- Have you developed or participated in the development of any 
  Lisp-related programs or libraries? If so, please supply a URL, 
  if possible. 
  
- Lisp variants you have used (e.g. Common Lisp, Scheme, Dylan): 
Common Lisp, Scheme 
  
- Lisp variants you're currently using or intend to use in the 
  near future: 
Pico Lisp?, Arc? 
  
- Lisp implementations you have used 
  (e.g. CMUCL, Lispworks, Allegro Common Lisp): 
MCL, Lispworks, DrScheme, MacScheme 
  
- Lisp implementations you're currently using or intend to use 
  in the near future: 
  
- Computer platforms on which you're using or deploying Lisp: 
Mac 
  
- Number of years of experience with Lisp: 
14 (very part-time) 
  
- Experience with other programming languages (please supply the 
  number of years and the name of the language): 
  
Much of the following is very part-time without significant useful results. 
FORTRAN - student, 1 semester 
BASIC - 4 yr 
Pascal - 16 yr (including commercial work) 
Forth - 8 yr (including commercial work) 
C/C++ - 6 yr 
Prograph - 2 yr 
  
- Total number of years of programming experience: 
23 (I actually first programmed a computer in 1966.) 
  
- Do you use Lisp: 
  - at work (if so, how much) - 
yes, not much 
  - for study (if so, how much) - 
yes, quite a bit 
  - as a hobby (if so, how much) - 
ditto 
  
- Are you using Lisp as much as you would like to? 
  If not, why not? 
  
I'm not using it anywhere near as much as I'd like to. It's been 
a large ambition for me since 1990, when I learned Scheme in an AI 
course. My practical use for it would be in my natural food 
supermarket, and the barriers seem to be the ease of generating user 
interfaces and integrating them with database or other industrial-strength 
storage methods. 
  
I would also like to revolutionize the way people interact with 
computers by using Lisp to provide a more natural-language interface, 
so that the computer would figure out the meaning of a user's 
input, rather than requiring the user to find the context (file, 
record, field) that makes the user's input meaningful. Doing this 
would require a mastery of Lisp and perhaps operating systems as 
well. 
  
- Do you see any obstacles to further Lisp growth (if so, what 
  is the biggest obstacle in your opinion)? 
  
Yes. Currently there seems to be little effort to communicate the 
benefits (potential and real) of using Lisp. Whenever I look at the 
home page of any likely activity related to Lisp, I see extremely 
out-of-date information. For example, the ALU site still (6/18/04) 
refers to the 2003 conference as if it were an upcoming event; 
Digitool shows almost no signs of life; Xanalys gives little 
indication that anything is happening. 
  
There are just about zero Lisp articles in any of the programming 
publications I read. 
  
- Would you be interested in a Lisp-related job or contract work? 
  
Yes, if appropriate to my skill level. 
  
- Is your organization interested in hiring Lisp programmers? 
  
Possibly. 
  
- Are you currently participating in Lisp-related meetings? 
  If so, where and how often? 
  If not, would you be interested in such meetings? 
  
I'm hoping to attend the ALU conference this year, if it's going to happen.