To conclude the conference, there was a panel about the future of Lisp, comprising Fare, Christian Quiennec, Nick Levine, Dave Cooper, and Greg Pfeil. I found this discussion frustrating, and I was pretty tired, so I apologize for the misrepresentations I am bound to make in this section.

The first topic for the panel was the Lisp community. Quiennec indicated that he didn't think there was such a thing as "the Lisp community" divorced from a specific language or implementation, which seems about right. Seeing as he was the only Schemer, most of the ensuing discussion too often conflated Lisp-in-general and Common Lisp.

There was only one question in the following discussion that was actually important: "where are the Clojure people?". I don't think we got a satisfactory answer to that question.

I asked why the demographics of this conference were so skewed. I was tired by this point of the day, so my question was probably pretty incoherent, unfortunately. I was however disappointed that it was completely ignored, and never addressed.

Trying to stir up trouble, I also mentioned the Smug Lisp Weenie image (which, real or imagined, is the biggest obstacle in the Lisp community, in my opinion), but no one bit. To me, one of the reasons Clojure won big was by not being called Lisp, which allowed it to escape a lot of the baggage associated with Lisp, especially the Smug Lisp Weenie aspect.

There was some discussion of the discoverability of Lisp; evidently the lack of a canonical forum has been a difficulty for some. There was a shoutout to #lisp , and an anti-shoutout to comp.lang.lisp .

The next two sections of discussion were on Lisp in innovation, and practical directions for Lisp, if I recall correctly. In any case, the topics became blurrier as the crowd started to interject with greater frequency. The core of the innovation part was basically, "why are all the PL researchers using Haskell/ML-family languages instead of Lisp?". The last section didn't have much coherency at all, except for treading over the usual watchwords: "libraries", "documentation", "curation", "community".

Robert Strandh pointed out something very important, which was that CL and Scheme are based on standards, in an age of languages defined by de-facto canonical implementations, and that this could be a source of strength if we paid attention to that advantage.

Near the end, R. Matthew Emerson said what hopefully everyone was thinking, which was that panels like this, filled with hand-wringing, tend to be pretty depressing; that important solutions like Quicklisp come out of people deciding to solve their own problems in Common Lisp; and that the most important thing any of us can do is to just go hack more Lisp, for which he received applause from all present.

Finally, as a reward to those who stayed til the end, there was a raffle for a Scheme-driven robot, which I won! (PICO-020, pictured above) Due to the overwhelming impressiveness of Esposito Louis's talk, he was awarded a second robot.

Marc Feeley promised to send me the whole toolchain. Although he hasn't yet, I found an associated paper and repo online.