lfetool T-Shirts?!

So, yeah... waaaaay too early for a T-shirt; the code has just gone from 0.1.x to 0.2.x. But, how could we resist: the project logo is retro like woodblock prints!

Earlier today, lfetool converted to using plugins (easier for contributors to play!), and hopefully later tonight YAWS + Bootstrap support will land. Regardless, there's tons more work to do, and what's more motivating for new work than a T-shirt? As you can see, we had no choice.

So let's get some. T-shirts, that is.

The lfetool logo is on the front, and Robert Virding's example Fibonacci lfescript code is on the back (with the lfetool command that generates the script at the top). Here's the front of the T-shirt:

And here's the back:

We've got a CustomInk sign-up sheet that you can add your name to if you want a shirt. I'll coordinate with folks individually, once we meet our minimum number (we're going to need to use paypal with payment upfront). Due to the colors of the source code on the back, the minimum order is 15. This will put the shirts at $22 a piece + $5 to send it to you. I've just ordered 2; 13 more go!

lfetool 0.2 Released

This release of lfetool has a bunch of new interesting features -- too much to cover in a tweet, so it's getting a little blog post ;-)

Here are the high-level bits that should make users' lives better:

• New yaws project type, provided for building basic web sites; includes the exemplar project as a dependency for generating HTML with S-expressions.
• Every project now gets TravisCI support by default.
• Unit tests, integration tests, and systems tests now each have their own dir.
• Tests now get run in parallel for faster run times.
• Added support for running on Linux and *BSD systems.
• Added unit tests for lfetool itself (shUnit) (for checking skeleton-generation and tool options).
• lfetool has a new logo :-)

Note that the version jumped from 0.1.2 to 0.2.0 due to the strong improvements in quality and feature set of the tool. Forth-coming features include:

• Support for an e2 service skeleton project.
• Support for a YAWS-RESTful service skeleton project.
• Support for YAWS embedded in a skeleton OTP application.
• Support for YAWS + Exemplar + Bootstrap projects
• Support for slide decks with Exemplare + Reveal.js

If you've got more ideas for the lfetool wishlist, post a comment here or send an email to the LFE mailing list.

The Future of LFE

Erlang Factory

First of all, Erlang Factory this year was just phenomenal: great talks, great energy, and none of the feared/anticipated "acquisition feeding frenzy." Instead, everyone was genuinely happy for WhatsApp and Cloudant, and with celebrations aside, they were ready to get on with the conference and dive into the tech :-)

And gosh, there was a bunch of good tech. If you don't believe me, check out the schedule. Also on that page are the speaker pics. For talks that have video or slides pushed up, the speaker pic is visually annotated and linked.

There's so much good stuff there -- I've definitely got my watching queue set up for the next few weeks ...

LFE Presentation

I gave a presentation on LFE which covered everything from motivational basics for using a Lisp in the 21st century, gave a taste of LFE in small chunks, and then took folks on a quick tour of creating projects in LFE. There was also some dessert of fun side/research projects that are currently in-progress. The slides for the presentation are here; also the slide source code is available (related demo project). I'd also like to give a shout out to the Hoplon crew for their help in making sure I could create this presentation in a Lisp (Clojure), and not HTML ;-) (It uses a Hoplon-based Reveal.js library.)

The Good Stuff

After the presentation, several of us chatted about Lisp and Erlang for a while. Robert and I later continued along these lines after heading over to the quiet of the ever-cool Marines Memorial 11th-floor library (complete with fireplace). Here we sketched out some of the interesting areas for future development in LFE. I'm not sure if I'm remembering everything (I've also added stuff that we didn't discuss in the library, like Sean Chalmers' recent experiments with types; blog and discussion):

• getting the REPL to the point where full dev can happen (defining functions, macros, and records in the LFE shell)
• adding macros (maybe just one) for easier use of Mnesia in LFE 
• discussing the possibility of an LFE stdlib
• gathering some of the best funcs and macros in the wild for inclusion in an LFE stdlib
• possibly supporting both (: module func ...) and (module:func ...) syntax
• possibly getting spec and type support in LFE
• producing an LFE 1.0 release

Additional efforts planned:

• building out an LFE rebar plugin
• examining erlang.mk as another possible option
• starting work on an LFE Cookbook
• creating demos of LFE on Erjang
• creating demos of LFE-Clojure interop via JInterface
• creating more involved YAWS/REST examples with LFE
• explore the possibility of an SOA tutorial with LFE + YAWS 
• async tasks in LFE with rpc lib 
• monad tutorial for LFE (practical, not conceptual)
• releasing a planner demo
• finishing the genetic programming examples
• LFE style guide
• producing a stdlib contribution guideline
• continued work on the LFE user guide

I'll dump all these into github issues so they'll be easier to track.

If this stuff is exciting to you, feel free to jump into the low-volume discussions we have on the mail list.

More soon!