3rd European Lisp Symposium, day 1

I'm participating in the 3rd European Lisp Symposium. My employer, SISCOG is sponsoring my participation and of a bunch of others, like the other Luís Oliveira of CFFI fame.

What follows are my notes of day one of the 3rd ELS, with an organization which follows the programme.

Welcome

Wifi not working...

The TI Explorer Lisp Machine. It is possible to submit ideas for lightning talks.

Keynote: Going Meta: Reflections on Lisp, Past and Future by Kent Pitman, HyperMeta Inc.

Over a period of several decades, I have had the good fortune to witness and influence the design, evolution, standardization and use of quite a number of dialects of Lisp, including MACLISP, T, Scheme, Zetalisp, Common Lisp, and ISLISP. I will offer reflections, from a personal point of view, about what enduring lessons I have learned through this long involvement.

Both the programming world and the real world it serves have changed a lot in that time. Some issues that faced Lisp in the past no longer matter, while others matter more than ever. I'll assess the state of Lisp today, what challenges it faces, what pitfalls it needs to avoid, and what Lisp's role might and should be in the future of languages, of programming, and of humanity.

Maybe Kent would collaborate in data standards and not language standards – the objective is to have more choice when selecting what programming language and OS you use to do your work...

Interesting, during the AI Winter, due to the risk of Lisp failing altogether (vendors were near to bankruptcy) there was some need to control the news to be more positive about Lisp. Then Gabriel presented Worse is Better and plenty of persons got mad at him.

Quote of a saying someone had at Symbolics:

At Symbolics, we make hard problems easy and easy problems harder.

Lisp has became the nerd of the programming languages. Lisp became detached. At that time Lisp was different and that was very relevant.

Book references: You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier; Crossing the Chasm

Some people like to be guided, actually they would pay to be guided. Smart people often don't get this.

The effects of free software: languages can no longer be killed.

The effects of the internet: Lisp being used in the server hidden.

The promise of Clojure: multi-core, it is connected (being in the JVM), vision (Rich Hickey).

QUESTIONS

Why is Lisp the language and a Runtime? Why isn't it just the language? One potential problem is CLOS, maybe we need to drop it and actually try to move in a way that it becomes more attached.

Session I (Mathematical Applications)

Verifying monadic second order graph properties with tree automata by Bruno Courcelle and Irne Anne Durand

Hard to understand and I didn't followed it fully...

A DSEL for Computational Category Theory by Aleksandar Bakic

A Software Engineer that worked on this as a hobby. He used CLOS and functions, trying to mix the two to improve the state of the art of the DSL design for this application, based on what was achieved in the other DSLs based in more functional languages. Book reference, the book uses Standard ML.

Keynote: Reading the News with Common Lisp by Jason Cornez, RavenPack

The financial industry thrives on data: oceans of historical archives and rivers of low-latency, real-time feeds. If you can know more, know sooner,or know differently, then there is the opportunity to exploit this knowledge and make money. Today's automated trading systems consume this data and make unassisted decisions to do just that. But even though almost every trader will tell you that news is an important input into their trading decisions, most automated systems today are completely unaware of the news - some data is missing. What technology is being used to change all this and make news available as analytic data to meet the aggressive demands of the financial industry?

For around seven years now, RavenPack has been using Common Lisp as the core technology to solve problems and create opportunities for the financial industry. We have a revenue-generating business model where we sell News Analytics - factual and sentiment data extracted from unstructured, textual news. In this talk, I'll describe the RavenPack software architecture with special focus on how Lisp plays a critical role in our technology platform, and hopefully in our success. I hope to touch upon why we at RavenPack love Lisp, some challenges we face when using Lisp, and perhaps even some principles of successful software engineering.

CTO of RavenPack. No Lisp code in the presentation, but, he is passionate about Lisp and software engineering and still writes plenty of code.

Quants traders. The opportunity - News are important, but, the algorithms didn't used it. News metadata is unreliable. 27000 companies tracked. Manage the historical news database - entity detection and time dependent data.

They use Lisp because they like Lisp and not because it was a problem that only Lisp can solve. Their customers don't care about RavenPack using Lisp. They also don't sell software, they sell data.

They worked with Franz to improve the interface to Oracle DB. Although they were acquainted of some solutions like CL-SQL, it didn't supported some things they wanted, like stored procedures. Other tools being used are: Linux, Git, Windows, Jakarta HTTP client, Java for integration, Apache Server, etc.

Common Lisp technologies: CL-XMPP, Jlinker (Franz), Allegro Server (Franz), Lisp Server pages, Salza compression, CL-store, etc.

Techniques:

• Bayesian filters – human experts that classify news as Ham or Spam which serves as training data. Accuracy of around 68%.
• Restricted Boltzmann machine – compresses some complex full representation into its minimal representation. Accuracy around 87%. It isn't enough for quanta trading.
• Processing Headlines, based on templates or patterns. Kind of rule processing.

Software architecture: boxes for receiving data, boxes for emitting data, boxes for analysis of historical data. Oracle at the center.

Collectors (read news) -> Real-time Analysis -> Event Server -> 
 Lisp                       Lisp + CL-Store        CL-XMPP (chat rooms)

Lisp frustrations: GC (Lisp is behind the curve compared with JVM and CLR), handling of out of memory errors, weak library support for HTTP, Lisp as a scripting language it is chatty on *standard-out* and last but not the least a lot of unfinished libraries.

Lisp Joy: patch live systems, optional keyword parameters, tools (debugger, REPL, tracer, inspector), FFI and macros.

Book reference: Coders at Work by Peter Siebel.

Coffee

15:30 - 16:00

I was indirectly invited via Tiago Maduro Dias to participate in the final panel of 3rd-ELS. After about 1 minute considering if I was the appropriate person to represent SISCOG, I said to myself, yeah, I'll do it, it will be a honor, let me see if I'm capable of it!

Session II (The Outside World)

16:00 - 18:00

Marrying Common Lisp to Java, and Their Offspring by Jerry Boetje and Steven Melcher

How Lisp looks in Java. Very detailed explanation on how Common Lisp is implemented in Java in CLforJava.

THOUGHTS: I would like that there was a similar design overview for ABCL!...

Tutorial: Computer Vision with Allegro Common Lisp and the VIGRA Library using VIGRACL Benjamin Seppke and Leonie Dreschler-Fischer

Offers filters, morphological operations, feature detectors, segmentation, transformations... All at the comfort of an Allegro REPL near you :-)

VIGRA Library - no Google, its not Viagra! C++, template based, unit tested, multi-platform and which is fairly complete in terms of available algorithms.

VIGRACL uses defsystem. It has a multilayer design with 4 layers. In the bottom, there is the VIGRA library in C++, then a C wrapper, then Allegro Common Lisp FFI and finally an abstraction layer implemented in Common Lisp on the top.

Design: multi-layer, slide.