Hello,
I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA. I was there but unfortunately I
had to leave early, so I missed Kent Pitman, Rich Hickey and the final
panel. I was curious to know how they were...
Also, I was wondering if the presentations have been recorded and
whether they can be seen online, but the website has not been updated
after the meeting. Does anyone know anything about this?
Thanks,
Alberto
Alberto Riva wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
> about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA.
No Kenny, no buzz.
kxo (who was wondering the same thing, actually)
Kenny wrote:
> Alberto Riva wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
>> about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA.
>
> No Kenny, no buzz.
Right. I told you we missed you!
Alberto
Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> writes:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
> about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA. I was there but unfortunately
> I had to leave early, so I missed Kent Pitman, Rich Hickey and the
> final panel. I was curious to know how they were...
http://lispy.wordpress.com/2008/10/ has a detailed series of recaps of
the OOPSLA Lisp50 event. Google's blog search will also turn up a dozen
or two other blog entries on the topic.
Zach
Zach Beane wrote:
> Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> writes:
>
>
>>Hello,
>>
>>I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
>>about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA. I was there but unfortunately
>>I had to leave early, so I missed Kent Pitman, Rich Hickey and the
>>final panel. I was curious to know how they were...
>
>
> http://lispy.wordpress.com/2008/10/ has a detailed series of recaps of
> the OOPSLA Lisp50 event. Google's blog search will also turn up a dozen
> or two other blog entries on the topic.
The Hickey/Clojure talk sounds /hot/!
http://lispy.wordpress.com/2008/10/25/lisp50-notes-part-vi-the-future-of-lisp/
kt
Kenny <·········@gmail.com> writes:
> The Hickey/Clojure talk sounds /hot/!
It certainly was impressive when he presented it to Lisp hackers at a
meeting in Boston this summer. The room started out skeptical and ended
(almost three hours later) by giving him two rounds of applause.
Zach
On Nov 20, 6:13 pm, Zach Beane <····@xach.com> wrote:
> Kenny <·········@gmail.com> writes:
> > The Hickey/Clojure talk sounds /hot/!
>
> It certainly was impressive when he presented it to Lisp hackers at a
> meeting in Boston this summer. The room started out skeptical and ended
> (almost three hours later) by giving him two rounds of applause.
>
> Zach
I saw both presentations. They were based on the same slides, but he
had less time at Lisp50 than at MIT. He'll present it again at the
International Lisp Conference at MIT in March (ilc09.org). Yes, it's
hot!
Zach Beane wrote:
> Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> writes:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
>> about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA. I was there but unfortunately
>> I had to leave early, so I missed Kent Pitman, Rich Hickey and the
>> final panel. I was curious to know how they were...
>
> http://lispy.wordpress.com/2008/10/ has a detailed series of recaps of
> the OOPSLA Lisp50 event.
Nice, thanks!
I have to agree with lispy that the "tone" was not very celebratory... I
was expecting something a little bit more entertaining. But again, I
missed the Clojure talk, which apparently was the highlight of the whole
thing... and this fact by itself probably says a lot about the reason
for the somber tone :)
Also, I was expecting to see a lot of other "prominent" Lispers (besides
Kenny, that is) who weren't there... in the end I think the occasion
could have been exploited better. Well, let's hope for the next ILC :)
Alberto
On Nov 20, 5:42 pm, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
> Zach Beane wrote:
> > Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> writes:
>
> >> Hello,
>
> >> I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
> >> about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA. I was there but unfortunately
> >> I had to leave early, so I missed Kent Pitman, Rich Hickey and the
> >> final panel. I was curious to know how they were...
>
> >http://lispy.wordpress.com/2008/10/has a detailed series of recaps of
> > the OOPSLA Lisp50 event.
>
> Nice, thanks!
For the record, I was dismayed with this summary of what I said. It
contained a lot of what I thought were inaccuracies. I tried to post a
response, but their site discarded it and lost me a couple hours of
work. I might try again another time.
> I have to agree with lispy that the "tone" was not very celebratory...
No one asked me to make a talk of celebration. They asked me to talk,
I thought, to cover a specific portion of the history. I could have
done the usual rah rah talk but people have heard that before, so I
tried to pick out some issues that might have gone past people. I
wanted to offer some observations about history made from a safe
distance, which is usually a luxury one can't do. (Unfortunately,
given the summary, I now feel an increased urgency to get a proper
discussion onto the record to avoid various confusions that I feel are
now actively hanging in the air waiting to infect people's
understanding of the issues I was trying to address, and I have some
regret about having opened some of the issues for discussion in the
first place.)
The stated theme of my talk, in contrast with the distasteful word
"Machiavellian" used in the summary alluded to upthread (I don't
_think_ I used that word myself), was to talk about the luck/
hapinstance/chance/felicity of certain events that led to the success
of CL because of various accidents of history that fell into place in
interesting ways. (The example of my having been burned once on
Maclisp intellectual property leading to my not getting tripped up by
ANSI was one such bits of felicity, but I cited some others.) I had
also wanted to talk about the way the process had evolved and how
people learned a lot about one another during the process.
At one point the summary refers to a cynical slide I'd offered rather
than stating that I offered a slide that gave an insight into how I
was perceiving things at the time. My offered slide was not cynical
but was optimistic about the ability of people to learn and grow.
I'll try to go into that in more detail if I get time to write this
talk up, which I'm under pressure to do anyway, and which the summary
makes me feel I should really hurry about.
But back to the conference itself, if there was a celebration part,
for me, it was getting to see old friends and talk about Lisp. But
seriously, the advance notice on this event was so short that I was
amazed anyone came at all. The talks were deliberately chosen to be
backward-looking, not forward-looking, in part because that was
thought to be more appropriate to the moment and in part to
deliberately focus things forward on the future at the conference in
the spring at ILC. I think you'll see a difference in tone there not
because this conference didn't know what it was doing, but because it
did. There is no way to have a 50th birthday party without some
"looking back and reflecting", and it was thought by various people to
be useful to get that out of the way so that in the spring we could be
looking forward. The Clojure discussion was added as a punctuation
mark at the OOPSLA. And Clojure sounds like it has some interest.
But I would expect to see more robust discussion generally about all
aspects of the future at the spring ILC.
> I
> was expecting something a little bit more entertaining.
Depends on what you like, I suppose. If this is an honest statement
of what you felt, who am I to argue? Everyone is entitled to their
opinion. And I can't speak to my own talk, but I found the talks by
others to be pretty uniformly fascinating and quite entertaining. I
had some administrative things I wanted to duck out to do but could
never tear myself away.
I'm willing to be called unentertaining personally and don't mean to
come across as rejecting criticism of me. I've been called worse. :)
I was just speaking to how I perceived the others.
> But again, I
> missed the Clojure talk, which apparently was the highlight of the whole
> thing... and this fact by itself probably says a lot about the reason
> for the somber tone :)
I don't understand this remark at all. Does this mean to suggest that
anyone is annoyed at seeing the Clojure effort go forward? I am, and
I think most or all of the panel members were, enthused to see people
doing interesting new things. No one ever meant the creation of a
standard to mean that research in other things should be cut off. The
importance of a standard is to create a safe space for commercial
applications to live while other things are evolved that might
themselves become standards one day. Why would anyone be somber about
that? Or am I misunderstanding this?
Clojure sounded like a great effort. It had some technical details
about it that made me want to look at whether it's where I'd like the
language to go, but that isn't to say it should hold back others or
even that I'll refuse to use it. (An example was some remark about
how object-oriented programming didn't fit in in some ways, or was
limited in some way. I'll have to follow up to find out what was
being referred to there because I don't want to be spreading
misinformation. But that might be good for some things and less good
for others. It's a reason for some interesting debate. But that's
not resistance, at least on my part, to them going ahead. I'm all for
exploration.)
>
> Also, I was expecting to see a lot of other "prominent" Lispers (besides
> Kenny, that is) who weren't there... in the end I think the occasion
> could have been exploited better. Well, let's hope for the next ILC :)
I think this was the short notice more than anything. Many people
need a lot of time to plan something like this. A few people were
going to be there for OOPSLA, but being away at a conference costs not
just travel time but lost salary (or used vacation) time except for
people who think it's work-appropriate. And the economy had just
tanked. Had I not already accepted as a speaker, I would not have
gone, even wanting to see all those speakers myself.
And Nashville probably isn't the best venue for other reasons. I
think it was picked because OOPSLA was already happening there and
someone thought there might be some overlap in people. IMO, it's an
expensive city to travel to and I doubt there's a huge contingent of
locals to feed walk-in traffic. At least in the SF or Boston area,
you're going to get some locals who didn't have to budget travel and
hotels.
Alberto Riva wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
> about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA. I was there but unfortunately I
> had to leave early, so I missed Kent Pitman, Rich Hickey and the final
> panel. I was curious to know how they were...
>
> Also, I was wondering if the presentations have been recorded and
> whether they can be seen online, but the website has not been updated
> after the meeting. Does anyone know anything about this?
The talks were videotaped and will be made available in the near future.
We are currently working on this, and will inform people in the usual
channels when they are there.
Pascal
--
My website: http://p-cos.net
Common Lisp Document Repository: http://cdr.eurolisp.org
Closer to MOP & ContextL: http://common-lisp.net/project/closer/
Pascal Costanza wrote:
> Alberto Riva wrote:
>>
>> Also, I was wondering if the presentations have been recorded and
>> whether they can be seen online, but the website has not been updated
>> after the meeting. Does anyone know anything about this?
>
> The talks were videotaped and will be made available in the near future.
> We are currently working on this, and will inform people in the usual
> channels when they are there.
Wonderful, thanks!
Alberto
On Nov 20, 2:26 pm, Alberto Riva <·····@nospam.ufl.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm a bit surprised that I haven't seen any discussion/report/comments
> about the Lisp50 celebration at OOPSLA. I was there but unfortunately I
> had to leave early, so I missed Kent Pitman, Rich Hickey and the final
> panel. I was curious to know how they were...
>
> Also, I was wondering if the presentations have been recorded and
> whether they can be seen online, but the website has not been updated
> after the meeting. Does anyone know anything about this?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Alberto
I have written about 2/3 of my trip report and hope to finish it
tomorrow and post it on my blog at danweinreg.org/blog. It's way, way
overdue!