I created a new series of Lisp themed t-shirts for the US market. We can now offer the same print quality as in Germany. Link

Edi Weitz announced the European Common Lisp Meeting, 24. April 2005. Confirmed speakers are:

• Jans Aasman
• Dave Fox
• Luke Gorrie
• Antonio Menezes Leitao
• Christophe Rhodes
• Robert Strandh
• Espen Vestre

I'll be attending. At Edi's suggestion I'll bring along some t-shirts and books.

Gregory V. Wilson is a smart guy. He wrote Practical Parallel Programming published by MIT Press. His recent article [1] in Queue is quite entertaining. Citing Steele's OOPSLA '98 keynote address [2] about growing a language he writes:

This article argues that next-generation programming systems can accomplish this by combining three specific technologies:

• Compilers, linkers, debuggers, and other tools that are frameworks for plug-ins, rather than monolithic applications.
• Programming languages that allow programmers to extend their syntax.
• Programs that are stored as XML documents, so programmers can represent and process data and meta-data uniformly.

He then goes on to describe a system that uses XML to store a program's implementation:

...XML will represent the program's deep structure. Only time and experimentation will tell whether this turns out to be something like an annotated syntax tree or something more abstract.

Like the Energize/Cadillac [3] system created by Lucid? Quoting from Gabriel's introduction to the Energize paper:

In the late 1980s, we started working at Lucid on a programming environment for C/C++. It was based on a programming-language-neutral, non-abstract-syntax-tree way of describing programs, annotations (a generalization of hypertext), a persistent repository for program information, and a tool-neutral user-interaction mechanism.

I think we will need some form of (hidden) markup or tagging to facilitate automated program comprehension in the near future, but XML will not help to achive this goal.

References:

1. ACM Queue - Extensible Programming for the 21st Century - Is an open, more flexible programming environment just around the corner?
2. Guy L. Steele Jr, Growing a Language - OOPSLA '98 keynote
3. Richard P. Gabriel, Energize/Cadillac

Alan Kay says some interesting and some strange things in this interview at Queue (via slashdot):

Today these languages run reasonably because even though the architectures are still bad, the level 2 caches are so large that some fraction of the things that need to work, work reasonably well inside the caches; so both Lisp and Smalltalk can do their things and are viable today. But both of them are quite obsolete, of course.

So the problem is - I've said this about both Smalltalk and Lisp - they tend to eat their young. What I mean is that both Lisp and Smalltalk are really fabulous vehicles, because they have a meta-system. They have so many ways of dealing with problems that the early-binding languages don't have, that it's very, very difficult for people who like Lisp or Smalltalk to imagine anything else.

Unix Review has a nice review of The Mathematical Century: The 30 Greatest Problems of the Last 100 Year by Piergiorgio Odifreddi.

Read The Mathematical Century, and you'll understand far more deeply the reasons software language designers want to include "lambda" in their creations, and why there's so much commotion over Riemann and his zeta. That's a good payoff for the few hours you'll need to absorb this slender volume.

I started tracking the sales rank of Successful Lisp on Amazon.com. Above is a graph of sales rank data for the past seven days.