International Lisp Conference 2009

The International Lisp Conference 2009 is over. I am delighted to say that it was quite successful. Not only were there no major disasters, there weren't even small disasters. I was quite happy with the quality of the papers: thanks and kudos to Guy Steele and the program committee!

Two speakers were unable to appear, and their time was reallocated to allow more lightning talks. I am particularly happy with how the lightning talks turned out. Three were submitted and accepted by the program committee, and the committee then gave me permission to put up a signup sheet and simply allow anyone to give a lightning talk. Guy Steele scheduled the talks, and kept the speakers to a relentless pace. The talks were fascinating. They included fun anecdotes, updates on various projects, presentations of some very useful software, and so on. I liked having a lot of lightning talks because it made the conference more participatory.

The panel on the future of Lisp was interesting, with many diverse opinions. The Great Macro Debate was both informative and very funny, with lots of audience participation, just as I had hoped. Thanks to Jeremy Brown for spending so much time to put together an excellent anti-macro presentation and stir everyone up! The banquet went just fine, including the Judy show by Tom Sjouros.

Best of all, we got great attendance: we had 210 registered attendees (of whom 202 showed up). I had only prepared tee shirts and tote bags for 175, but we made 300 copies of the proceedings. So there are plenty of copies of the proceedings left, and the ALU will set up a way to buy them. (They're books in real paper, not CD's.)

Thanks to everyone who helped with and attended the conference!

Now that it's over, I hope we can continue some of the discussions on this site. Please contribute!