2016-05-10

European Lisp Symposium 2016

The last two days, I'm at the ELS2016. So far, it's being a great experience - I've actually forgotten the joy of being in one room with several dozens of Lisp enthusiasts. The peculiarity of this particular event is that it's somewhere in the middle between a scientific conference, like ACL, that I had a chance to attend in the recent years thanks to my work at Grammarly, and a tech gathering: it employs the same peer reviewed approach and a scientific presentation style you will find at the research conferences, but most of the topics are very applied and engineering-related.

Anyway, the program was really entertaining with several deep and insightful presentations (here are the proceedings). The highlights for me were the talks on the heterogenous sequences type-checker implementation based on the Lisp declare facility (that I'm growing more and more fond) by Jim Newton and a presentation of an image-processing DSL that's an excellent example of the Lisp state-of-the-art approach in DSL design by Kai Selgrad. Other things like a description of the editor buffers protocol, local variables preservation technic were also quite insightful. And other good stuff is coming...

It's also great to hear new people bringing fresh ideas alongside old-timers sharing their wisdom and perspective - one of the things I appreciate in the Common Lisp community.

Near the end, I'm going to present a lightning talk about RUTILS and how I view it as a vehicle for evolving the Common Lisp user experience.

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