Back from ECLM 2006 #
random, hacking, May 2nd 2006
Got back home from European Common Lisp Meeting 2006 around 21:00 last night. The trip was good, except for my continuation from Copenhagen to Helsinki, which was overbooked. My hotel in Hamburg was right on the Reeperbahn, which made the nights a tad noisy, but not significantly worse then they are here in Kallio. (There are two bars below our apartment, and a "massage parlour" right down the street — so Reeperbahn was almost homy...)
Presentations were good, but I was sort of disappointed by the Franz one. I'm sure their triple-store is a sterling product and the best thing on the triple-store market right now, but they didn't really manage to say anything interesting about it.
In comparison to that, all the other "commercial" (ITA, Ravepack, and Cadence) presentations managed to say things that were interesting from the technical POV, even though they were talking about their proprietary products.
My personal favorites were the SigLab presentation — which was very very cool, even though I don't know almost anything about signal processing, and Arthur Lemmens' Rucksack presentation. The cl-muproc thing was quite interesting too, but not so much my cup of tea.
The presentations were really only the icing on the cake, though. The real value (for me, at least) of ECLM were the dinners and after dinner discussions. It was very good to be able to put faces to names of correspondents, and even better to be able to talk with people without the constraints of electronic media.
Talked to many people about streams, and what I would like to do with them in SBCL. I'll have to think about a few things a bit more, and wite my thoughts into a comprehensible format for others to look at.
Talked to many people about Steel Bank Studio and made a short announcement about it (which didn't quite go the way I had it planned, but nothing earth-shattering about it). As a result of this I know have a somewhat better idea of what my added value will look like to my future customers. Also had a brief chat with Dave Fox of Lispworks, which was good (yes, obviously they're competition, not customers).
Talked to about a million other people too, about a million thing (including a quick chat about fencing with Ralf Mattes — who it turns out is a long-time fencer with an "old-fashioned" bent), but enough of that. If I promised to get back to you about something, and you don't hear back from me within this week, please let me know.
I have to say that in terms of bang-for-buck ECLM has a format that is very hard to beat.