I wrote several almost finished blog posts during ILC, but didn't get around to posting them "live" due to the issues with wireless access and a generic lack of time, due to being off having a jolly good time. Then I did some more traveling after the ILC, and didn't manage to get them posted right afterward either. And now that I'm finally back home, most of what I wrote then no longer seems worth posting, since it's lost the immediacy.

So here's a few things that come to mind now.

The good

The organization was stellar in almost all respects. A huge thanks to Nick Levine and anyone else who was involved. Cambridge was just incredibly pretty, and the weather ranged from great to "not bad". There were some very good talks, though disappointingly most of the best ones were from Schemers :-) The last day of talks was particularily good. I had incredible fun meeting old friends, most of whom I hadn't seen for a year, putting faces to names I knew from the net, and talking to completely new people. Special honorable mentions in the latter category go to Jeremy Jones and Richard Brooksby, with whom I had several very interesting and fruitful discussions.

I also got lots of very valuable SBCL feedback and new ideas, for all kinds of things from the GC to the user interface for my code coverage tool for SBCL (work in progress). It looks as if we need to beef up the SBCL marketing department, though. I had several discussions of the form "Q: What would it take to make SBCL do FOO? A: It's already done that for the latest X releases.". In the worst case with the same person asking for three different features in succession, all of which had been implemented :-) For example no-one seems to be aware that SBCL/Slime have stepper support. Not horribly good stepper support, but support nonetheless. Also got to talk shop with SBCL developers and Clozure/ITA people, which is always good. And maybe even managed to offload some ideas that I'd proof-of-concepted, but have no intention of ever properly implementing myself.

Got a surprisingly large number of congratulations on graduating. And the guys had even got me a present (a copy of the Lisp 1.5 manual that Nikodemus had found from a bookshop in Cambridge, MA). Thanks! Conveniently the title of the programming contest for the next ILC was pre-announced as "Lisp 1.5", so the manual might even be useful, not just cool :-)

I think the Ravenbrook guys are going to try integrating MPS with SBCL, since CMUCL didn't work out for them. While it's unlikely to replace the current SBCL GC for licensing reasons (it's currently under a GPLish license), it would be very interesting for two reasons: as a benchmark for the current GC and as a first step towards pluggable GCs. The first one would be good since we know that the SBCL memory management is suboptimal in many ways. It'd be valuable to find out what the real cost of fixing many of those suboptimalities is. As for pluggable GCs, Frode wrote a nice message to sbcl-devel about that. If MPS is better for someone's use case than SBCL's gencgc and they can live with the license, it'd certainly be nice for them to be able to just switch GCs. And of course at some point implement other alternative GCs.

Compared to the ECLMs, surprisingly many people that I talked to weren't yet using Lisp seriously, but were just interested about it. Some might think that this is bad, but I think it's really great that there are people still in that stage who are interested enough to travel to and attend a multi-day Lisp conference. And of course there were a lot more serious Lisp users than newbies.

Overall my ILC experience was very positive. I'll talk next about some bad stuff, but that's just because I believe that you can't just sweep that stuff under the rug.

The bad

I think that program-wise there was maybe a day of talks that could've been discarded with little loss. Or if not a whole day, than at least enough to make the rest of the schedule less tight. For example the History of Lisp presentation was total crap (not just somewhat bad, but "I'd rather listen to an hour of silence"-bad), and the information theory one had no business being presented in a Lisp conference. Given what little I heard of the review process in other cases, I don't understand how the latter ever got accepted.

I understand that people don't really go to a conference for the talks, but that doesn't mean that anything goes. My plea to the next ILC program committee is threefold:

Please invite only speakers with something to say that's relevant to Lisp now or in the future, not in the last millennium.

More specifically, I'm sure there's a temptation to "honor" the 50th birthday of Lisp by historical navel-gazing. Please don't give in to it.

If you don't get enough good submissions, don't accept the irrelevant ones as padding.

My attempts at industrial espionage were mostly a failure. Both Duane and Jans ran out of time before getting around to stuff that would've been both worth stealing. For example Duane didn't have time to demo their profiler, which I'd heard described as the gold standard of Lisp profilers, and of course I can't really try it out myself due to the license. I was surprised that the Allegro equivalent to SBCL's optimization notes didn't have any kind of UI for mapping the notes back to the original source, making it look mostly useless. Or at least Duane, who is probably an expert at reading them, did get confused by the results a couple of times despite it being a scripted demo :-)

[ Which isn't to say that Franz's presentations were bad. I just didn't get much out of them SBCL-wise. ]

The controversial

Some stuff has received a lot of airtime after the conference.

Before the conference I expressed some puzzlement about there being an invited talk about CL-HTTP, which I regarded as a choice that was completely out of touch with the current state of the Lisp world. Seeing the talk didn't change my opinion (oh, wow, still using the White House information system from the Clinton administration as the example?). E.g. when Mallery asked about who had ever used CL-HTTP, and practically no hands went up, unlike with every other similar question that was asked during the conference. But amazingly enough, in the last day two presentaters appeared to be seriously using CL-HTTP. (IIRC they were the RacerPro and XMLisp ones).

Most of the Allegro features that Duane and Jans had time to show were things that SBCL already does in some form. It's just that they're exporting their internals, and in some cases the interfaces don't seem very polished. I guess READ-LINE-INTO (?) wouldn't be a bad addition, but e.g. MEMCPY-UP and MEMCPY-DOWN were just completely wrong.

So I wasn't horribly impressed with what they talked about. But unlike Luke, who was stirring up the debate both at ILC and after, I think that it is a very worthwhile goal to give Lisp users access to low level facilities, and that we really should be suppling non-consing / resource-reusing versions of functions where possible. STRING-TO-OCTETS and OCTETS-TO-STRING are an obvious example where SBCL could be improved.

Yes, it'd be really great to just cons indiscriminately, but no matter what the GC scheme is, there will be programs where consing will be deadly. And yes, it'll mean that code written for performance might be a bit ugly, but it's still better than dropping to C from Python for performance, etc. Of course SBCL users can use many of those low level facilities right now, but most of them are undocumented and unexported, which sets the bar for using them pretty high.

The end

Anyway, it was lots of fun! I hope to see all of you again next year.