Come to the European Common Lisp Meeting!
The European Common Lisp Meeting will be in Hamburg, on the weekend of September 12 and 13, 2009. I greatly enjoyed last year’s ECLM, in Amsterdam. It’s relaxed and gives you a lot of opportunity to meet great Lisp experts from all over the world. Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz did a superb job arranging for entertainment and space, and making sure everyone was happy.
I’m also looking forward to seeing Hamburg; I’ve never been there, and it sounds great.
I’m giving a talk entitled A Highly-Available Large-Scale Transaction Processing System in Common Lisp. It’s about the airline reservation system that we’re building at ITA Software, specifically about the issues involved in using Common Lisp, which is not widely thought of as being a language for writing large-scale transaction processing.
The lightning talks at the International Lisp Conference last March went so well that Edi and Arthur are trying out this format at the ECLM. After the ILC, someone told me that at another sofware-related conference he had been to, the lightning talks fell flat: few people signed up to give talks, and they weren’t very good. At the ILC, I thought they were nearly all great. We learned about new tools, stories, and so on. There was a great one about using Lisp in a Lisp-unfriendly world. In a nutshell: if they force you to program in PERL, then run a PERL-coded Scheme interpreter and write in Scheme! I anticipate more fun lightning talks in Hamburg!
So, I encourage you to join the fun!
June 30th, 2009 at 7:37 am
Your talk sounds really interesting, I wish I could make it!
June 30th, 2009 at 4:03 pm
[...] irony of a LISP (yes, intended) hacker writing PERL: http://danweinreb.org/blog/come-to-the-european-common-lisp-meeting [...]
June 30th, 2009 at 4:10 pm
Is there any chance the ECL presentations will be recorded (especially yours)?
June 30th, 2009 at 8:12 pm
Just thought I’d mention – I noticed when somebody pointed it out on another blog and I know you’re one to appreciate accuracy… Perl is most properly spelled just like that: ‘Perl’.
I do admit, I’m guilty of the same thing – I’ve been mistakenly spelling Lisp in all caps, and seeing that you use ‘Lisp’ I am happy to correct my habit in the future
July 1st, 2009 at 8:04 pm
I can’t go, but would love to see video of your talk!
July 6th, 2009 at 7:13 pm
@Steve Scaffidi: I understand that John McCarthy, the inventor of Lisp, still prefers “LISP” in all caps, and has spoken out against the mixed-case version. So if anyone is “wrong” here, it’s those of us who write it in mixed case. But I decided some years ago to write “Fortran”, “Cobol”, “Refine”, etc. etc. — any programming language name that’s pronounceable as a word — in mixed case. So I stick to that.
(In formal documents I am willing to use small caps for these, but I’m not going to bother in casual writing.)
July 7th, 2009 at 9:21 am
I’ll second Scott – video would really be fantastic.
July 9th, 2009 at 2:09 am
I think the Lisp community needs a better website … How about lispcast.net or lispconf.net ?
This can be a place where all videos, papers and interviews from lisp conferences can be posted … If you check out the communities around Java, Python … , All of their content is instantly available.
Just a suggestion. Don’t you’ll think something like this is way due for lisp, and its community ?
I offer to get things started (register the domain, design the initial version of the site, post content …) … Im sure things will take of on its own from there …
Slicehost seems to be an affordable way and nice place to host this …
July 30th, 2009 at 4:47 pm
Dan, you are using Clozure CL for the Airline Reservation System, right?
It would be nice if you could mention that. I’ll link this webblog to the Wikipedia entry of CCL.
Thanks.
August 27th, 2009 at 10:05 am
@joswig: Yes, we are indeed using Clozure Common Lisp (CCL, formerly known as OpenMCL) for the airline reservation system. We like it very much, and working with the people at Clozure is a joy.
February 4th, 2010 at 8:25 am
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