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+;;;;;
+title: ELS 2015
+tags: lisp
+date: 2015-04-22 21:35:23+01:00
+format: md
+;;;;;
+
+Yesterday the 8th [European Lisp
+Symposium](http://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/) finished.  In short it was
+a great experience (I was there the first time, but hopefully not the last).
+The variety and quality of talks was great, a good number of people attended
+both the actual talks as well as both(!) dinners, so there were lots of
+opportunities to exchange thoughts and quiz people, including on Lisp.  Also
+except for one talk I believe all talks happened, which is also a very good
+ratio.
+
+For the talks I still have to go through the proceedings a bit for details, but
+obviously the talk about the Lisp/C++ interoperability with Clasp was (at least
+for me) long awaited and very well executed.  Both the background information
+on the origins, as well as the technical description on the use of LLVM and
+the integration of multiple other projects (ECL, SICL, Cleavir) were very
+interesting and informative.
+
+There were also quite a number of Racket talks, which was surprising to me, but
+given the source of these projects it makes sense since the GUI is pretty good.
+VIGRA, although it's a bit unfortunate name, looks pretty nice.  The fact that
+the bindings to a number of languages are available and in the case of the
+Lisps make the interaction a lot easier is good to see, so it might be a good
+alternative to OpenCV.  It's also encouraging that students enjoy this approach
+and are as it seems productive with the library. 
+
+P2R, the Processing implementation in Racket is similarly interesting as there
+is a huge community using Processing and making programming CAD applications
+easier via a known environment is obviously nice and should give users more
+opportunities in that area.
+
+If I remember correctly the final Racket talk was about constraining
+application behaviour, which was I guess more of a sketch how application
+modularity and user-understandable permissions could be both implemented and
+enforced.  I still wonder about the applicability in e.g. a Lisp or regular
+*nix OS.
+
+The more deeply technical talks regarding the garbage collector (be it in SBCL,
+or Allegro CL) were both very interesting in that normally I (and I imagine
+lots of people) don't have (a chance) to get down to that level and therefore
+learning about some details about those things is appreciated.
+
+Same goes for the first talk by Robert Strandh, *Processing List Elements in
+Reverse Order*, which was really great to hear about in the sense that I
+usually appreciate the `:from-end` parameter of all the sequence functions and
+still didn't read the details of the interaction between actual order of
+iteration vs. the final result of the function.  Then again, the question
+persists if any programs are actually processing _really_ long lists _in
+reverse_ in production.  Somehow the thought that even this case is optimised
+would make me sleep easier, but then again, the tradeoff of maintainable code
+vs. performance improvements remains (though I don't think that the presented
+code was very unreadable).
+
+*Escaping the Heap* was nice and it'll be great to see an open-sourced library
+for shared memory and off-heap data structures, be it just for special cases
+anyway.
+
+Lots of content, so I doubt I'll get to the lightning talks.  It'll be just
+this for now then.  Hopefully I have time/opportunity to go to the next ELS or
+another Lisp conference; I can only recommend going.