Daniel P. Friedman: A Celebration

On December 3 and 4 of 2004, the Computer Science Department at Indiana University hosted this conference on the occasion of Dan's sixtieth birthday. It brought together many of his former and present students, colleagues, research collaborators, co-authors and friends.

The conference was kicked off on Friday morning by a welcoming message by Andrew Hanson, the chairman of the Computer Science Department. Guy Steele, a Sun Fellow at Sun Microsystems Laboratories, delivered a one-hour keynote address entitled "Dan Friedman: Cool Ideas." Twenty other speakers gave half-hour talks on both Friday and Saturday in Lindley Hall 102. This report includes the conference program with the names of the speakers and the titles of their talks. It also includes a list of all of the people who registered for the conference.

At the luncheon in the Federal Room in the Indiana Memorial Union, several people related anecdotes about Dan and he was presented with several gifts, including a lovely portrait of Dan drawn by his thesis advisor, Terrance Pratt, and a copy of the first edition of The Little Lisper signed by everyone present. The highlight of the luncheon was Dan's heart-warming speech of appreciation, which concluded with his relating some touching anecdotes about his career. Dan's whole family, Mary, Robbie, Rachel, Sara, Dorothy, Jacob and Lola Goldberg, and Shannon Romine, were all present.

Saturday evening was party time in the Faculty Club of the Indiana Memorial Union. With tasty hors d'oeuvres and various liquid refreshments, many small groups formed to reminisce. Lively klezmer music was provided by a band made up of five students at the IU School of Music. Jonathan Salter, the son of Richard Salter at Oberlin, played piano and clarinet in the band, and made the arrangements to have the band play for us. The last part of the evening was again devoted to various people relating their experiences with Dan. We all had a great time. Everyone gave a strong expression of appreciation to Jill Cowden for so efficiently handling the complicated arrangements that enabled the conference to proceed so smoothly.

The Participants

See also the photos by George Springer and the photos by Shriram Krishnamurthi.

Program

Friday, December 3rd

10:30: Welcome: Andrew Hanson, chair, IU Computer Science Department (video)



10:40: Mitch Wand: Relating models of backtracking (video)



(video) 11:10: Lynn Winebarger: Extending Scheme for bottom-up relational programming (video)



(video) 11:40: Bil Lewis: Debugging backwards in time (video)

12:00-1:30: Lunch

2:30: Break

3:00: Guy Steele: Dan Friedman: Cool Ideas (video) Over the last three decades, Dan Friedman has explored many cool ideas about programming languages. We examine a handful of them and discuss their influence on other work, notably the development of Scheme. Introduction by David Wise (video): There was and is too much good to say introducing Guy Steele, and I

set out to describe the special interaction between him and Dan and

IU, in so many ways through the years. In doing so, I muffed the

peak of that collaboration: the 1982 ACM Conference on Lisp and

Functional programming held at Skibo on the CMU campus (the first of

an ongoing series.)

Key point not said: Guy was Local Arrangements Chair for that

meeting which Dan and I organized, and it was only through his offices

that photographs were taken at that still remarkable event. I showed

a few of them and, now that video is to be posted for posterity,

complete captions are necessary. The event was a small reception for

the conference's organizers held immediately before the conference

banquet on August 17, 1982. Picture 1: Alan J. Perlis, then at Yale but who won ACM's first Alan

J. Turing Award for his work at Carnegie Tech (CMU).

Picture 2: Nico Habermann, Alan's successor as Head of CMU's

computing departments, Joe and Gabrielle Stoy, then of Oxford. Alan

with back to camera.

Picture 3: Alonzo Church, Virginia Curry, Anetta Rosser, J. Barkley

Rosser, with Haskell Curry in front.

Picture 4: Richard Gabriel and Barbara Steele.

Picture 5: L. Peter Deutsch, William Woods, Gerry Sussman, and Dan

with back to the camera. The photographs are distributed here by permission of ACM.

4:00: Break

4:30: Olin Shivers: The anatomy of a loop: a story of scope and control (video)



(video) 5:00: Kevin Millikin: Obfuscating transformations via abstract interpretation (video)



(video) 5:30: Bob Filman: Poetry in programs: A brief examination of software aesthetics,

including some observations on the history of programming styles and

some speculations on post-object programming (video)

Saturday, December 4th

9:00: Gerald Jay Sussman: The role of programming in the formulation of ideas (video)



(video) 9:30: Anurag Mendhekar: Aspect-oriented programming in the real world (video)



(video) 10:00: Shriram Krishnamurthi: Verification of web programs (video)

10:30: Break

11:00: Jim Marshall: Introductory cognitive science course using Scheme (video)



(video) 11:20: Rhys Price Jones: DNA analysis (video)



(video) 11:40: Oleg Kiselyov: Normal-order syntax-rules and proving the fix-point of call/cc (video)

12:00-2:00: Luncheon -- IMU Federal Room

3:30: Break

4:00: Jonathan Sobel: Implementing Categorical Semantics (video)



(video) 4:30: Mike Ashley: Scheduling and Controlling Laboratory Robotic Systems with Scheme



5:00: Matthias Felleisen-Robby Findler: An investigation of contracts as projections (video)

8:00 Party -- IMU Faculty Club (second floor)

Registrants

Ashley, Mike

Blandy, Jim

Byrd, William

Duba, Bruce

Dunn, Michael

Dybvig, Kent

Felleisen, Matthias

Filman, Robert

Findler, Robby

Fisler, Kathi

Flatt. Matthew

Friedman, Dan

Ganz, Steve

Garcia, Ron

Ghuloum, Abdulaziz

Hanson, Andrew

Haynes, Chris

Hilsdale, Erik

Hofstader, Douglas

Johnson, Steve

Jones, Rhys Price

Kiselyov, Oleg

Kohlbecker, Eugene

Krishnamurthi, Shriram

Lawall, Julia

Lee, Shinn-Der

Lewis, Bil

Marshall, James

Mendhekar, Anurag

Menzel, Suzanne

Millikin, Kevin

Mueller, Chris

Nienart, John

Prior, Robert

Rossie, Jon

Sabry, Amr

Salter, Richard

Sanders, Nathan

Shan, Chung-Chieh (Ken)

Shivers, Olin

Siek, Jeremy

Siskind, Jeffrey

Smith, Leon

Sobel, Jonathan

Sooriamurthi, Raja

Springer, George

Stamm, Sid

Steele, Guy

Sussman, Gerald

Vizzoto, Juliana

Wand, Mitchell

Widom, Jennifer

Willcock, Jeremiah

Winebarger, Lynn

Wise, David

Wright, Andrew



Acknowledgements

Julia Lawall took the initiative to contact all of the participants and plan the program. The local arrangements for such things as accomodations, lecture hall, luncheon, and reception were handled by George Springer and Jill Cowden. Andrew Hanson and Linda Barchet also helped with many of the administrative details that made the conference possible. The Web page used to announce the conference and report on it has been designed and maintained by Chris Haynes. Thanks to Duane Busick for his videos of the talks, and to William Byrd for uploading them to the Web.