#define private public - European Lisp Symposium 2009: Keynote (03 Jun 2009)

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---+++ [[DefinePrivatePublic20090603EuropeanLispSymposiumKeynote][European Lisp Symposium 2009: Keynote]] (03 Jun 2009)

<img src="http://bimib.disco.unimib.it/elswiki/skins/common/images/ELS/ELS2009logo.gif" style="float:right;" />

<summary>
As <a href="http://www.clausbrod.de/Blog/DefinePrivatePublic20090530EuropeanLispSymposium">promised earlier</a>, here 
are some more notes from this year's 
<a href="http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/">European Lisp Symposium</a> in Milan - this time about Scott <nop>McKay's keynote presentation on what he has learned in his years as a Lisp and Dylan programmer at companies like <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics">Symbolics</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlequin_(software_company)">Harlequin</a>, <nop>HotDispatch and 
<a href="http://www.itasoftware.com/">ITA Software</a>. 
</summary>

Scott joked he might well be the [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zelig][Zelig]] or 
Forrest Gump of the Lisp community, after having been around for a long time and 
making appearances in a number of (unlikely?) places. In amusing anecdotes,
he explained some of the key learnings he took away during his career, and what 
those learnings might mean for the future of Lisp and the Lisp community.

Some notes (from memory, hence most certainly inaccurate):
   * "Any bozo can write code" - this is how David Moon dismissed Scott's attempt
     to back up one of his designs with code which demonstrated how the design
     was meant to work.
   * "Total rewrites are good" - Scott was the designer 
     of [[http://www.cliki.net/CLIM][CLIM]], which underwent several
     major revisions until it finally arrived at a state he was reasonably happy with.
   * "If you cannot describe something in a spec, that's a clue!" - amen, brother!
   * "The Lisp community has a bad habit of building everything themselves"
   * "Immutability is good" (even for single-threaded code)
   * "Ruby on Rails gets it right"; only half-jokingly, he challenged the community to 
     build something like "Lisp on Rails". Later during the symposium, I learned that
     we already have [[http://kevin.casa.cavewallarts.com/LISP/LOL/lol.html][Lisp on Lines]]
     ("LoL" - I'm not kidding you here :D ).
   * "Java + Eclipse + Maven + XXX + ... is insane!" - and later "<nop>J2EE got it spectacularly wrong" :D
   * He reminded us that the Lisp Machine actually had C and Fortran compilers,
     and that it was no small feat making sure that compiled C and Fortran programs
     ran on the system without corrupting everybody else's memory. (I'd be curious
     to learn more about this.)
   * Lisp code which was developed during Scott's time at <nop>HotDispatch
     was later converted to Java - they ended up in roughly 10x the code size.
   * The QRes system at ITA has 650000 lines of code, and approx. 50 hackers
     are working on it. Among other things, they have an ORM layer, transactions, 
     and a persistence framework which is "a lot less complicated than Hibernate".
   * Both [[http://users.rcn.com/david-moon/PLOT/index.html][PLOT]] and
     [[http://alloy.mit.edu/][Alloy]] were mentioned as sources of inspiration.

Scott then went on to develop a list of features which a future version of Lisp, dubbed
<i>Uncommon Lisp</i>, should have. That list was pretty long; notable features which I remember were:
   * Should run on a virtual machine
   * Good FFI support very important
   * Support for immutability
   * Concurrency and parallelism support
   * Optional type checking, statically typed interfaces (=define-strict-function=)
   * "Code as data" not negotiable

Not surprisingly, [[http://www.clojure.org][Clojure]] was mentioned quite often,
both during the keynote and in the subsequent Q&amp;A session. I'm still
not quite sure what Scott's position on Clojure really is. To me, most of the points 
he made seemed to actually back up design decisions in Clojure: For instance,
Clojure runs on a VM, reuses the libraries and tools of the underlying platform, 
connects easily to other languages, makes a decided effort
to support concurrency well, and while it breaks with Common Lisp syntax, it is still
in the Common Lisp spirit of being a pragmatic implementation of the fundamental Lisp
ideas. On the other hand, Scott also criticised some Clojure details (name resolution
comes to mind), and seemed uncertain whether to full-heartedly recommend
everyone to join the Clojure camp right away.

I _think_ what Scott tried to get across is that a revolutionary approach
is both possible and worthwhile for the Lisp community. Revolution, 
of course, means breaking with the past, and it became obvious during Friday's panel 
discussion on the future of Common Lisp that not everybody at the symposium felt
comfortable with the thought.

PS: [[http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=259505][Michele Simionato]]
discusses the keynote presentation from a Schemer's point of view.

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