Lisp Conference and OOPSLA summary

[Brian T Rice]

Hi all,

I just spent two weeks of nearly continuous attendance of the
International Lisp Conference and OOPSLA '02. The proceedings are at:
http://international-lisp-conference.org/
http://oopsla.acm.org/

I formally presented Slate at the Lisp conference, and was pleased with
the number of useful comments and suggestions made by various people. I
also obtained a contact to the Maude group (http://maude.csl.sri.com) so
that I am now alpha-testing Maude 2.0, which looks like will take some
time to get into release shape.  The 2.0 release is supposed to be a final
letting-go by SRI under the GPL.

I also met with David Ungar before the Lisp conference and we discussed
some recent goings-on including Slate and some other prototype-based
languages. He's actually working on Self again, though I don't want to say
too much before there's something ready to demonstrate. David was also at
the OOPSLA conference as a member of several committees, and seemed to be
asking most of the interesting questions to some of the other speakers.

Michael Rutger was the only Squeak Central representative, though that
distinction is becoming obsolete rather quickly, as the deliberations in
that community made clear. I didn't get the chance to formally present
Slate to the Squeak birds-of-a-feather meeting, but I did explain the
system to a score of people individually, and most seemed to not have
major complaints to the concept or our plan of execution.

Returning to subject of Maude, I made a pitch to an IBM researcher who
spoke on their Autonomous Computing initiative. It seems that they don't
have a clear idea on how to formalize many of their concepts, and so I
pointed out the concepts and research behind and around Maude and how it
related. I will contact them shortly with a short proposal that should be
interesting. I think this is a great way for some Tunes WWW- and
system-related goals to become effected.

There were a lot of detailed specific ideas and algorithms explained there
which should help Slate out a bit when it's mature enough to support them,
probably too many to mention, and most of them are not online yet.

A few links are helpful:
http://www.ravenbrook.com/project/mps/
http://www.cs.technion.ac.il/~zyoav/
http://www.simulys.com/lispqi.htm

If you have specific questions about something mentioned in one of the
conferences' programs, feel free to ask. Some people already wrote trip
reports at:
http://ww.telent.net/cliki/International%20Lisp%20Conference%202002
http://www.whysmalltalk.com/oopsla/oopsla.htm

I am now a member of both the Association of Lisp Users and the Smalltalk
Industry Council, and will gradually start to get involved there.

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water@tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/