Lisp Propulsion Laboratory log

Paolo Amoroso's weblog. Main interests: Lisp, astronomy (Moon), space exploration (Apollo and early manned programs)

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Why not discuss Lisp at Lisp conferences?

Monday, November 22, 2004

The ALU has recently posted an ILC 2005 call for contributions. I have never been at a Lisp conference, and this is a good occasion to tell something that always bothers me when browsing the proceedings of ILC 2002, the latest I have -- the ILC 2003 proceedings have not been published yet.

With the tongue firmly in check, and with the caveat that this is my understanding from the printed edition of the proceedings, consider the following ILC 2002 talks, which can be grouped into a few "unusual" categories:

• Category You WILL be assimilated, resistance is futile:

  Making a Living in Languages by Howard Stearns

  Worse is still better, and Lispers should be using the Curl web language instead.

  Plotting and Scheming the Ubiquitous LISP by Andrè van Meulebrouck

  Lispers should be using JavaScript instead.

  Sharpening the Parentheses: Bringing Lisp Ideas to Programming the Web by Henry Lieberman, Christopher Fry, and Mike Plush

  Lispers should be using the Water language with XML-like syntax.

• Category Is this the right conference?:

  Multi-method Dispatch and Prototypes, and the Slate Programming Language by Brian Rice

  What has Slate to do with Lisp? According to one of the talk's slides:

  Influences: Self/Smalltalk, CLOS, and Common Lisp

  That's all, folks.

• Category Current non-Lisp projects of Lisp gurus:

  Large-Scale Web Services, and the Programming Languages that Build Them by Peter Norvig

  Google uses Python. And besides, Python is so much better, more popular and sexier than Lisp.

  The Road Not Taken by Richard Gabriel

  Computer science education sucks. Let's improve it by studying poetry.

Some think that, in order to spread the voice about Lisp, it is useful to organize conferences of broader appeal for business people and programmers from other language communities. After all, Lisp may benefit from exposure to new ideas.

I no longer buy this. It's more the other way around: other languages are getting more and more Lisp features. And since good ideas can come also from other fields, then Lisp conferences should be general computing conferences. You have to draw the boundary somewhere.

Given the limited resources, I think that Lisp conferences should appeal to hackers and focus on technical Lisp issues. Lisp needs just one thing right now: code, code and code. Hackers are the only ones who can deliver the code. Events such as the 1st European Lisp and Scheme Workshop, and the informal talks at the Libre Software Meeting high-level languages track, seem similar to what I think would be useful.

I have never been at a Lisp conference. But having to pay 500$, plus a trip abroad, for attending Lisp-bashing talks at a Lisp conference, makes me think twice. When Kenny Tilton gives a keynote speech at a major Perl conference, I may relax my constraints -- no pun intended.