3rd European Lisp Symposium – a light review

The symposium was nice, small enough that you were capable of getting acquainted with a large percentage of persons and individually chatting with the presenters after their talks. There were a majority of persons related to academia, but, due to the large participation of SISCOG, I think that industry was almost half the number of persons. It is funny that by the number of academia persons is clearly larger from the point of view of presentations and involvement in the organization. We need more industry involvement not only for paying the checks, but, also for presenting and participating in the organization.

I would like to have seen some specific content related to Clojure. Alas, I should have proposed a lightning talk, but, I still don't have anything to show yet, so, the solution would be to spend one night preparing things, but, I preferred to enjoy the dinners. There is something that should have been added related to cloud computing and web applications. Note that RavenPack although not being that, it is a real time data service for financial companies, so, it isn't a mainstream application, but it is very interesting on its own and it is novel.

The overall feeling which I get of the Symposium is that of a group of persons who still suffer at the fact that being Lisp such a special thing, the Symposium should have a larger number of persons, the companies that use Lisp should be larger and more profitable, the open source libraries more polished and more in number, etc. I think that we like the persons which are part of the community and the accessibility of our stars, such as Kent Pitman. We don't like the fact that Lisp is still foreign in large swathes of the industry. Nevertheless, we are seeing a resurgence of Lisp and its use both in academia and in the industry. Now we need to get scale and solutions, so, like for other languages, we need some killer applications / frameworks. This might be a multitude of them, since there are several Lisp dialects and each one may pursuit something different.