This entry is mostly a late report on the European Lisp Symposium, held a couple of weeks ago at the LaBRI in Bordeaux. I think both Pascal Costanza (Program Chair) and Robert Strandh (Local Organizing Chair) deserve a pat on the back or two, because everything seemed to go off without a hitch; an interesting programme, plenty of things to do, good food, and (best of all) bad weather, so it didn't feel too depressing to be in a lecture hall for most of the day.

I actually went to Bordeaux a couple of days early, partly to meet with old friends (a big thank you to Rachel and Tim Moore for putting me up for the week) and partly so that I could give a talk about my main research project to the Image et Son research group there. Some useful discussion ensued, which was good.

The first day of the symposium had a closed writers' workshop session, run in parallel with Birds-of-a-Feather sessions. I wasn't a writer (so I wasn't at the writers' workshop), but from what I heard it was a useful exercise for those present: the idea is that written work that is in progress is briefly presented to a audience of peers, who then discuss it without reference to the author; the author can then garner a lot of useful feedback for improving the paper. (There are also formal mechanisms for defusing tension, and the reason for closing the session is to make sure that everyone present is on the same level.)

The BoF sessions were probably the thing that need more care in future; they were organized a little bit at the last minute, so session leaders were unprepared (and there wasn't much of a choice: only one BoF at a time meant that people defaulted to that rather than anything else, quite understandably). I attended a session about concurrency, but without paying much attention as I rediscovered the fact that hacking for 45 minutes continuously is much more than three times as productive as hacking three times for 15 minutes. I skipped the next one to talk some more with Pierre Hanna and Matthias Robine about Music Information Retrieval (or “work work” as opposed to “play work”).

After lunch I tried to act as chair of a CLIM / McCLIM BoF session. The problem with it being the default choice was that we spent a lot of time on background rather than on discussing the future – not that that's too bad a thing when Scott McKay is sitting at the back of the room, because we could get a lot of background. The really unfortunate thing, caused mostly because of the short notice, is that almost none of the demos actually worked: I had a CLIM Listener that I couldn't type into; Troels managed to wedge SBCL's threads somehow, and even Andreas and his Classic CLIM demos managed to send keyboard focus somewhere. We agreed that the next release would come with working demos. Still, choice quote from Scott: “oh yeah, I wrote that!”

Apparently there was then a BoF focussing on replacing ASDF, which maybe got further because of better focus. I was in a meeting at that point, tentatively planning (with others) ELS 2009, which will be in Milan, hosted by Marco Antoniotti and chaired by António Leitão – put May 2009 in your diaries now! After that, we went to the mairie, technically as invitees of Alain Juppé, for drinks and a speech about how historical and forward-looking Bordeaux is. Nasty surprise: I got volunteered to do simultaneous translation, which is hard; I learnt afterwards that the mayor's underling who'd been volunteered to give the speech was also a first-timer, so that explains the utter confusion and sentences like “Bordeaux is nice” that came out.

The second day of the symposium was dedicated to the technical programme: a fine set of talks, I think. Mine (work done in collaboration with Jim Newton) suffered from being the third different talk I'd had to give in ten days; I think I was not as clear as I would have liked to be. But I did get some questions, including one from Didier Verna about what good class-eq specializers are, about which more in a later diary entry. I enjoyed Didier Verna's talk a lot; though it didn't tell me anything I didn't know, it was a clear presentation of a problem of expression and how to solve it using CLOS and the MOP; the talk by Sebastián González about Ambient Objects and Context-Oriented Programming was extremely well judged, I think.

And then it was all over bar the banquet, which was nice; plenty of useful discussions with colleagues past, present and future; good food, good wine (well, you'd hope so...) and good company. And then back home in time to perform in the English Music Festival and fall asleep, fortunately in that order.