Sam's L33t Journal

Last weekend, I was at the International Lisp Conference in Montreal, at the beautiful University of Montreal. (I stayed in their ultra-cheap surplus dorm hotel, which was comfortable enough but not at all luxurious. Couldn't beat the location, though.)

There were some cool demos and academic stuff, but I was most focused on all the excitement on the practical side of Common Lisp:

• ASDF 3 (a buildsystem and portability layer)
• Quicklisp (a package management system, just (load "quicklisp.lisp") once to set it up, then (ql:quickload :package) to load a package and all of its dependencies, downloading and installing them automatically if necessary)
• cl-launch (a program for running Common Lisp files as simple scripts (soon will be as simple as #!/usr/bin/cl plus your code) or creating standalone executables)

I'm not going to jump into thinking that a Common Lisp revolution is right around the corner, but the usability is going up.

I liked Robert Smith's presentation on cl-permutation. And Ken Wakita's presentation on ExJS, a hygenic macro system for JavaScript where the intermediate expression is Scheme code! (Seemed a bit like an inversion of the usual "when you have Lisp, you have any language" aphorism.) The proceedings are published here.