1. Well, my answer is some odd amalgamation of the other responses. I've been quite busy, will be for the foreseeable future (on the order of a couple years), and Silicon Valley (a common consensus here) is a little too out of my way for a "dinner party", so I almost certainly wouldn't be showing up. Besides being in the same boat as shader wrt the funds and transportation. But it's an interesting idea, so here it goes.
2. Code for Code. What tools facilitate the actual process of programming, and how are those tools themselves programmed? I don't mean this in too broad a sense, like any ol' API or library for frobnicating your database or querying some widget. It's more like "developer tools", though that doesn't sound very zazzy. In the sense I mean, it covers language implementations and compilers, which are certainly very interesting, but also many more things we use that no one seems to get nearly as excited over. REPL tools, syntax highlighters, debuggers, profilers, code introspection, pretty printing, documentation systems, software testing (randomized à la QuickCheck, unit testing, whatever), type systems, bug tracking, ... the list goes on. It starts getting increasingly tangential (e.g., if we count text editors, do we slippery-slope ourselves into counting entire operating systems?). You probably get the gist, though.
My interest is independent from Arc -- or any language, for that matter. I had to learn Vimscript to make a halfway decent highlighter, for instance. But it's the sort of thing I don't think we hear enough about, since we get used either to having these tools or just doing without. So, how do we make programs for programmers, and what kind should we make? How novel can we get?
3. Moot point per 1, but I could talk about some of the work I've done along the lines of 2.
4. February 31. Everyone will be free that day. ;)
I agree, Code for Code was pretty much what I was looking for as well. I think I like lisp mainly because I can actually work on metaprogramming topics easily and without straying too far from the code itself. Arc doubly so, since the language definition is so short.
Oh, and I don't have anything scheduled for Feb. 31 either ;)
