I spent the weekend in Amsterdam, doing ordinary touristy
things on
the days when I wasn't attending the 2008 edition of the European Common Lisp
Meeting.
I suspect that most readers of this diary are likely to prefer a
summary of the ECLM to the details of my wanderings on the
(rather
cold) Saturday, so that is what I shall provide.
Walking through the streets of continental cities early
(around 08:00)
on a Sunday Morning is usually a pleasant experience –
everything is closed, most people aren't even yet going to
appropriate
religious observances, and so you get an unimpeded view of
the town,
devoid of the hordes that can cause obstruction or aggravation.
Unfortunately, Amsterdam is a somewhat popular destination
for British
‘stag’ parties; and, indeed, as I was walking down
Leidsestraat, two such parties, who did not seem to be the
sort to be
going either to an appropriate religious observance or to
the ECLM,
passed each other. Noise ensued.
On arriving at the Felix
Meritis, at 08:30 on the dot, I saw a crowd of people, all
seemingly with the same idea: to have the first coffee of
the day.
Fortunately, the doors opened shortly afterwards, and
caffeination was
allowed to take place. Conversation happened as well,
though I can't
remember very much of it, not yet having been fully
invigorated by the
coffee. Mostly I think I explained why I wasn't on the previous
night's boat trip: a combination of somewhat tardy
registration and a
second mouth to feed...
And then the real action, the talks, got under way. Unlike
many an
academic conference, of of the ECLM's distinguishing
features is that
the talks are attended by the vast majority of the participants;
there's much less of a feeling that people simply attend to
chat to
colleagues: probably partly because the talks are very much the
‘deliverable’ of the meeting (there are no
proceedings or
anything like that) but also, I think, because the talks cover
interesting ground, and offer perspectives based on a solid
amount of
experience.
Jeremy Jones (from Clozure
Associates) started the ball rolling, with a talk on the
production of InspireData:
an application built for data visualization in an (American,
pre-University) educational context. Jeremy wisely started
off with a
demonstration of InspireData's features; it contains some very
impressive-looking tools, and seems to present them to the
user in a
sensible way. I haven't tried it or gone beyond the demo,
but it
looks like a huge advance on, say, using an off-the-shelf
spreadsheet
program to do data analysis, even (dare I say it) for
professionals
– though whether it scales up to professional-sized
data sets is
another question.
Some other take-home messages from Jeremy's talk: it is
possible to
sell shrink-wrapped software, even today, even written in
Lisp; having
a proper designer on the team (or as your client) can help
enormously
in producing a usable interface; and having a programmer as your
client can be both a help and a hindrance – specify the
acceptance process carefully.
Nicholas Neuss followed Jeremy, with a discussion of the FEMLISP framework for solving
partial differential equations. Being in a somewhat
darkened room,
early in the morning at a weekend reminded me a little of my undergraduate
days, where discussion of differential equations, fields
and the
like was par for the course – and the talk took me
right back
(in a good way). In particular, watching FEMLISP compute the
eigenmodes of Lake Constance (surface waves, I think) was
entertaining. One difference in kind between this talk and the
previous is, I think, a function of the possible
‘market’
for the two tools; InspireData is sold in quantities of the
order of
tens of thousands at present, while, let's face it, FEMLISP
is never
going to have that kind of exposure: and so the resources aren't
really available to make FEMLISP into a product usable by
even other
domain experts. Of course, the fact that Nicholas' boss makes a
competing product might also have something to do with that...
There followed a talk about large Internet systems, from Stefan
Richter. There was an interesting survey during the talk,
asking
people about the size of their userbase (assuming that they
worked on
web applications at all). An interesting distribution;
certainly
applications with millions of users are no longer
rare –
and Juho showed
commendable
restraint in not snorting something along the lines of
“millions of users?” One other
interesting moment
was when Nick
Levine stopped
Stefan, to give him time to write down the long list of
libraries that
is already available to help build Lisp web applications,
from the
database to the front-end.
Kilian Sprotte gave the last presentation before lunch,
talking about
the GL-enabled
Patchwork music
visual programming system. The presentation unfortunately
appeared to
be a little bit unrehearsed, and so I'm not sure that Kilian got
everything that he wanted to across to the general audience.
From my
perspective, though, it was sufficiently close to the day job that I could
see the
point (and catch some of the references; B-A-C-H and so on)
–
I'll be able to report back to people in the lab, who were
asking
about it, and maybe we can find some useful musical analysis
algorithms in there. Also, it occurred to me that GSharp could
usefully provide some import or export functionality for the
chord and
score editors, maybe through MusicXML, or maybe writing
directly into
the PWGL notations for notes (tighter couplings are likely
to be hard,
given PWGL's current non-Open-Source nature.)
Then we broke for lunch; Juho, Nikodemus and I ended up
sitting
on a table with Hannes Mehnert and Luke Gorrie; among other
conversations, we had The
Great SBCL Maintenance Debate, and we now have a
proposed Plan.
(I don't know if any other plans have been proposed, but
hopefully
soon there will be less uncertainty.) The rest of the lunch
break was
spent grilling Luke about OLPC and Kathmandu, and eating
interesting
interpretations of café food. (Pasta
arrabiata with
beans and squash? I don't think so.)
After lunch, a talk about cheap apartment
design architect
assistance software: Knowledge-Based Engineering, where in
this case
the knowledge base is about Norwegian building regulations.
The idea
of the House Designer product developed at Selvaag is
to allow
architects to experiment with designs, while tracking that
building
rules (both governmentally-imposed and the house style) can be
accommodated, along with all the necessary pipes and
electrics and so
on. It was good to see a variety of techniques on display,
and I
liked the flashes of humour: for instance, that the
user-interface
group asking for XML descriptions was OK by the Lisp group,
but that
then the user-interface group wanted to send XML back, and
that was
not OK. It's good to know that Frode Fjeld has a
Lisp job,
too; he was solidly namechecked in the presentation.
Then Juan José García-Ripoll came to the stage
to talk
about ECL design and implementation. There were some wry
moments for
me there; starting with the observation that he wasn't really a
computer scientist at all, but rather a physicist. Also,
many of the
motivations for the ECL design appear to be direct analogues
of some
of SBCL's
PRINCIPLES:
completeness, clean bootstrappability, and preferring
maintainability
over whizzy features, for instance (I hope I'm not
mischaracterizing
here; it's possible I'm just evaluating what he said through an
SBCL-tinted lens). Given that, I think it's interesting how
different
the two systems look, maybe just from having different starting
points?
After the final coffee break, yet more talks. Marc Battyani, of
FractalConcept
HPC Platform, talked
about
using Lisp to program FPGAs for custom high-performance
solutions; in
particular, applications in the financial world, such as
derivative
valuations and automatic share trading platforms. (A word
of advice
to Marc: it's not often that you get to say that you're 1000
times as
fast as your nearest competitor, nor that you can process
packets
faster than the test network can send them to you – so
don't let
that message get hidden by the constant fumbling for a
particular
Microsoft Image and Fax viewer window!) The products he has
look
interesting; best of luck to him for finding a buyer in
these more
financially-challenged times...
And finally, the pièce de résistance: Kenny
Tilton took the stage, to give “a rant on the state of
Lisp and
Lispniks touching on Algebra software, Lisp libraries, Open
Source,
Cello, Cells, and somewhere along the way introducing
Triple-Cells,
animated data modelling with persistence for free”.
Unfortunately, it seemed that we weren't going to get this rant;
instead, we got a small demo of the Algebra tutoring
software, along
with some discussion of the dataflow paradigm that Kenny
believes is
central to all simple applications, and a fair number of sound
effects. Nice anecdote about Lisp and speeding tickets, though.
Then it was all over bar the dinner; I chatted to Pascal
Costanza and
Charlotte Herzeel about the busy workshop season, to Jeremy
Jones and
Marco Baringer about the (lack of) checkin policy to SBCL's
CVS, to Edi about how much Heathrow
Airport
sucks, among many conversations. As we were about to call
it a night,
Nick mentioned that the Lambda
Express
had some spare tickets, and that we could probably hitch a
lift back
to London by train (rather than by plane to Terminal 5...),
so we
arranged to meet Dave Fox and his crew the following
morning. While
on the train, in a spirit of cross-implementation
co-operation, we
essentially finished the Araucaria from the Saturday
Guardian –
documentary evidence will be forthcoming. And then it
really was all
over.