July 21, 2008 — jao

I’ve been playing with CLOS again these days (after finding it specially apt for one of my pet projects (more on that later)) and just stumbled upon this fun video by Daniel Bobrow, the chair of the committee that standardized CLOS in the late eighties and, to this day, research fellow in the mythic Xerox PARC.

Daniel gives a good introduction to the Common Lisp Object System, its design trade-offs, the main ideas behind it (generic functions, classes, reflection), and talks a bit about the standard body’s work (fun to see how, back in the day, using mailing lists for discussion was considered innovative).

Besides its vintage charm (don’t miss the Q&A session at the end), the talk works as a good little introduction to CLOS (despite occasional inexactitudes), which can be supplemented by this nice article by Bobrow, Gabriel and White.

Enjoy!