Lisp Users Group Meeting
Fred Gilham
Noone has said anything about the Lisp Users Group Meeting yet so I
thought I'd make a few comments.
First, I really enjoyed the meeting and recommend anyone interested in
Lisp to go to it next year if you can. There was a neat combination
of past and future there, with people who know Lisp from the days when
it was riding high, as well as people who have discovered it recently.
Among the `older generation', significant papers/talks were given by
Peter Norvig (keynote speaker), JonL White (numerics) and Dick Gabriel
(keynote speaker and general purpose prophet and visionary). It's
great that these people are still participating in the Lisp community.
My biggest surprise was to find out that Eric Naggum is a very
soft-spoken person, to the point that many people had a hard time
hearing his talk until they got the microphone working. :-)
Tim Bradshaw gave a great talk on `creeping metafeaturism' on the
second day of the conference that ended with the words "it's hopeless"
or something very close to that. Fortunately everyone still showed up
for the final day of the conference. His point was that many of the
whiz-bang new features in other languages are not as helpful as they
are claimed to be, but that it's hard to give an answer to people who
say that `Lisp is a poor language because it doesn't have XXX'; you'll
appear to be either behind the curve or trying to cover up the lack
with technical complexity. The irony here is that Lisp used to be
`too big'; now it's `too small'.
There were several application talks including Chuck Fry's description
of the Deep Space One Remote Agent Experiment which showed once again
that Lisp is capable of pulling chestnuts out of fires caused by C/C++
but people will still want to use C++ anyway.
There was a round-table where the question of what Lisp programmers
were good at came up. One thing I took away from it was that the
ability to treat programs as data is really important. From this I
concluded that any change to Lisp's syntax that detracts from its
capability to do this is misguided and probably doomed.
Duane Rettig's talk on breakpointing was fascinating. I found out
that Windows 95/98 is even more brain-damaged than I
realized---apparently you can't force a breakpoint into your own code
in Windows 95/98. Your breakpoint instruction either gets ignored or
dumps you into Windows' own debugger.
Finally, Franz did a really good job organizing and hosting the
conference and I want to express my appreciation for the work they've
put in to help keep the Lisp community alive as a community.
--
Fred Gilham gil...@csl.sri.com
"Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you
rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and
lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke
is easy, and my burden is light." --Jesus of Nazareth
john....@alcoa.com
Fred Gilham <gil...@snapdragon.csl.sri.com> wrote:
>
> My biggest surprise was to find out that Eric Naggum is a very
> soft-spoken person, to the point that many people had a hard time
> hearing his talk until they got the microphone working. :-)
Didn't they say that about St. Paul - His letters were powerful but his
speach was unimpressive?
--
John Watton
Alcoa Inc.
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Gareth McCaughan
[Erik Naggum's talk]
> What are people's impressions of the concept of representing
> time using a two-tiered system (number of days and number of
> seconds), within eras which are based on a 400-year leap-year
> cycle, with ``ground zero'' being March 1, 2000?
>
> Personally I find this a remarkably clean representation.
Presumably it's complicated by leap seconds. But then,
so is any other representation. It sounds pretty good
to me.
--
Gareth McCaughan Gareth.M...@pobox.com
sig under construction
Tim Bradshaw
>>
>> If I get things right, Tim gave a similar talk at ELUGM '99. Unfortunately,
>> the proceedings only include a four line abstract. I haven't seen the LUGM
>> '99 proceedings yet, but I hope they include a full paper because the topic
>> is interesting.
> Tim didn't make it to ELUGM 99. He made an heroic effort to get there
> despite some physical pain (I think it was back-related) and an incident
> with trying to get into a standby slot that I think he would have to
> explain himself, but he couldn't get there that day. We filled his
> spot with a discussion group.
Don't remind me. I've now had two interesting experiences like this
-- one getting *actually onto the plane* before they realised they had
over-booked it, which I find really frightening, since they clearly
had basically no idea who was on the plane, and today coming back from
LUGM and the J13 meeting which followed it, changing at Heathrow and
than getting into the UK at Edinburgh basically without going through
customs at all. So much for securtity.
Anyway I'll put a copy of the paper up on www.tfeb.org in a day or so
(it's PDF and thus enormous, sorry). Actually I might actually revise
it a bit to represent the talk as given which had a whole bunch more
stuff in it than the paper that I thought up the night before.
--tim
Erik Naggum
| Presumably it's complicated by leap seconds. But then, so is any other
| representation. It sounds pretty good to me.
it is important to understand that leap seconds take two forms:
A separately identified seconds (23:59:59, 23:59:60)
B seconds that last twice as long (23:59:59, 23:59:59)
the former applies to what I call "Scientific Time" in my paper, the
latter to what I call "Political Time". the scientific community is
obviously concerned with well-behaved time, while the political
community is concerned with well-behaved people through well-behaved,
yet manually updated, clocks. Scientific Time is fundamentally relative,
while Political Time is fundamentally absolute, although at first glance
it appears the opposite must be true. Scientific Time maintains the
concept of time differential as its primary concern, while Political Time
is concerned with points in time, _only_, and is oblivious to the effects
of points in time that have no well-defined differential between them.
when dealing with Political Time, it is therefore meaningless to try to
capture leap seconds as no actual clock will show the time that the
scientific community will want to label the leap second. mapping between
Scientific Time and Political Time in this regard is also trivial, and
protocols such as the Internet Network Time Protocol are very good at
this. there is, in consequence, no leap second to be concerned with.
put another way, I called my time concept "local time" because it applies
to what time is perceived to be locally. "universal time" is just that,
and is furthermore _unsuited_ to represent local time as humans want to
experience it. universal time may or may not be suited to represent
"real time" or other concept of time differentials -- I have not looked
into that issue as deeply as it would require to take a firm position.
the paper is available at <URL:http://www.naggum.no/lugm-time.html>, and
is about 60K large. the link to the source code and implementation is
not yet operational.
#:Erik
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld
Are there notes, slides, abstracts or anything else from the talks at
LUGM anywhere on the web?
In particular I'm interested in the one entitled "Dist[ributed]
Transactions", <URL:http://www.franz.com/lugm99/conference/ataglance1.html>
Thanks,
--
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld
myriam abramson
>
> Are there notes, slides, abstracts or anything else from the talks at
> LUGM anywhere on the web?
>
Where can I get the "proceedings", tutorial, etc?
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> Tim Bradshaw gave a great talk on `creeping metafeaturism' on the
[...]
> There were several application talks including Chuck Fry's description
> of the Deep Space One Remote Agent Experiment which showed once again
I have received the proceedings. The bad news is that no papers related to
these interesting talks are included. The good news is that the meeting's
t-shirt is absolutely cool :-)
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> Where can I get the "proceedings", tutorial, etc?
For more info about ordering the LUGM'99 proceedings and t-shirt you can
write to (address obfuscated for antispam purposes):
i nfo at
franz dot com
The proceedings of ELUGM '99 (June 1999) and the 40th Anniversary
Conference (November 1998) should be available as well.