I got a note from JonL White in response to my ILC posts and some of the comments on them. With his permission, I've reproduced it here in its entirety:

A quick point or three (without my making an entry at this point) to clear up some misconceptions I've seen in some comments so far.

1) The actual number of ILC registrations was 56 -- which include those whose fees waived (we traditionally do that for all Invited Speakers and all tutorial presenters, Occasionally there may be a couple of others.) I personally witnessed a max of 50 people in our Conference room, and I'd say a 'mode' of about 35 people. This is actually good, since we laud the goal of people coming to this Conference to do a substantial amount of "schmoozing and boozing'" in the hallways and elsewhere. (Well, perhaps, much less of the 'boozing' .. but I hope you get what I'm aiming at here.)

2) Although CL seems to be dominant in the ILC series ... the other active dialects are not left out! In all four of ILC'05, 07, 09, and this one (ILC''10) we had an invited speaker who specialised in Scheme; in all three of ILC'07, 09, and 10, we had at least one presentation involving the use of Emacs-Lisp (two of those were due to me -- a "software demo" in 09, and an update -- which you heard this year as a "lightning talk" -- of the new directions it is taking.) We've had three papers on/in Dylan -- all by Hannes Mehnert, in 07, 09, and this year 10. In 2007, we had a paper on 'Curl' (a lisp-like language used in certain Web application; In 2003, and 2005 we had Invited speakers on the Lambda Calculus and Formal Logic (John McCarthy, and his one-time student John Allen.) The recent paucity of Scheme submissions seems to me to be due to the fact that commercial application in Common Lisp are far more common than in other dialects, and still resilient (as Lowell Hawkinson's presentation indicated this year.) The ILC's in 2002 and 2003 were kind of "one-offs" in that most presentations were "invited" -- from a pool of speakers that are likely no longer interested in given such speakers; but for a picture of the really wide variety of interests, see http://international-lisp-conference.org/2003/Speakers/ILC03-speakers.html

3) Hannes Mehnert's presentation was indeed graded "hi-quality", i.e. what some might interpret as an academic paper. 3 of the 8 "paper" type submission were accepted this year in that high-quality category.

Alas the ACM portal for the ILC'2010 Proceedings in the ACM DL has posted a totally fabricated number saying that "7 out of 7" submissions where accepted this year (but they correctly report that "6 out of 22" submission in 2009 were 'accepted' this way.) I've no idea where this bogon came from and am trying to get Gabriel's attention to help get it fixed pronto. (Likely, it came from manufacturing company in New Jersey that was collecting materials for production of the CD-ROM of all the Proceedings of all colocated Conferences at SPLASH.; the didn't seem to bright too me, and not particularly cooperative with the scrunched schedule that we had for sending in our content.)

-- JonL --

P.S. On the notion of an "academic" paper ... here s a bit of a background on the confusing termonilogies.

First, a Conference (as opposed to a "Symposium" or a "Seminar") has a distributed Proceedings of all the interesting _written documents_ that were presented at the Conference. There may be many other events that were presented which are not "written documents" -- such as videos of significant results by programs, such as impromptu talks (including even invited talks and lightning talks,) and such as presentations of marketing trends by vendors. [See comments below about the OOPSLA Companion.]

But there must be some significant as well as some "interesting" written documents for the record (or Proceedings.) "Significant" and "Interesting" need not overlap, nor coincide. But there must be at least something 'significant' to justify the term 'Conference" (i.e. one that will justify 'tenure' credit.)

The ILC Proceedings,"as with *any* true Conference, is "published" by virtue of its being distributed to all participants including passive attendees of the Conference. Such a publication makes any written submission some sort of "academic" paper. Alas, for better or worse (and I thiink "worse") in the entire scientific and research communites world wide, the term "paper" is reserved to mean a written document being presented at a "Conference" wherat (1) the program committe is comprised of notable and academically-acceptable individuals; and (2) about 70% or more of all submissions to that Conference were rejected as being of this highest "paper" quality. Conferences may still have dozens of other kinds of written documents in their _Proceedings_ -- including 'technical reports', 'software demonstrations', 'applications of technologies,' 'variant ideas and designs,' and '(interesting) experience reports.' OOPSLA has been doing this for years, putting the non-top-rated material into a separately-bound document called the OOPSLA Companion (which I believe is also put into the DL.)

Incidentally, tlhe ILC'2010 Program Committee was officially approved by the Chairs of the SIGPLAN Executive committee during our pre-Conference preprations.

In this year's case, the distribution of the proceedings was bundled in onto the SPLASH CD of all colocated Conference's proceedings; thus all SPLASH attendees received also the ILC Proceedings; and all ILC registrants received all the other SPLASH colocated Conferences' Proceedings.

This is a part of the benefit of colocating, especially considering how interrelated the subject matters are for Lisp, Object-oriented Languages, and "Dynamic Languages" (the DLS'2010 seminar.) And happily I've obtained tentative agreement with some of the OOPSLA steering committee that future attendees who want to jump around between colocated conferences should be able to register for two conferences while paying only something more than the max of either one ... but something noticeably less than the sum of the two.

One might note that -- as far as I recall -- a good Lisp "paper" (q.v.) was accepted at OOPSLA for the first time in a awfully long time. It was by authored by Charlotte Herzeel (two good papers in ILC'07 and ILC'09) and Pascal Constanza (well-known Lisp Wizard, ILC P.C. member, and ILC co-General-Chair in 2007.) If one thinks that we lost a good 'high-quality, academic' paper this year, a better way to view it is that our cooperation with OOPSLA folks this year softened them to the acceptability of Lisp in the "academic" venue.

Ciao for now,

-- JonL --