My paper entitled "CLoX: Common Lisp Objects for XEmacs", presented at the 3rd European Lisp Symposium last week, is now available for download on my website.

You can find it here.

Based on a recent experience, here is some piece of advice on how to (not) make a good "invited speaker" scientific presentation.

1. Don't think you have been invited because you won a Nygaard price or whatever, but because you have designed a cool language.

2. If you really need to start your talk by showing off your latest book to the audience, at least consider offering one to the lab that has just invited you.

3. Don't spend half of your presentation on your CV (My Life, My Accomplishments etc.), because that's not why you were invited, and because the audience doesn't give a damn.

4. When you have 60 minutes, don't come with the usual 300 slides that you carry everywhere and pick some at random. Your presentation won't make any sense.

5. Before coming, try to take at least 5 minutes to figure out who you're going to talk to, what they know, what they don't. This will help you make more sense out of your presentation, and then, perhaps the audience will actually learn something.

6. Try to understand that when you have an idea, it's not necessarily a good one, and when others have ideas, they're not necessarily bad ones.

7. Try not to be dogmatic because this doesn't look so good to scientists. Show some humility. It is better to have many questions than to have all the answers.

8. If you really want to make people believe that you have actually done some bibliography in your research, try to cite at least one paper more recent than the first OOPSLA in 1986. Otherwise, the picture of your knowledge about other current programming languages is, like, pretty explicit, and a bit sad.

9. Understand that trying to sell your product will never work with researchers.

Well, I guess in summary, try to show some interest for the rest of the world, and especially for your audience, or just don't come. Otherwise, you will look like a fool.

My article entitled "Revisiting the Visitor: the Just Do It Pattern" has just been published in the JUCS journal, Volume 16, Issue 2.

You can find it here.

I'm happy to announce that I will be presenting a paper at ELS 2010, the next European Lisp Symposium, in Lisbon. The abstract is given below:


CloX: Common Lisp Objects for XEmacs

CloX is an ongoing attempt to provide a full Emacs Lisp implementation of the Common Lisp Object System, including its underlying meta-object protocol, for XEmacs. This paper describes the early development stages of this project. CloX currently consists in a port of Closette to Emacs Lisp, with some additional features, most notably, a deeper integration between types and classes and a comprehensive test suite. All these aspects are described in the paper, and we also provide a feature comparison with an alternative project called EIEIO.

Hello,

I'm happy to announce that I will be presenting a paper at TUG 2010, in San Francisco, for the 2^5th birthday of TeX. The abstract is given below:


Classes, Styles, Conflicts: the Biological Realm of LaTeX


Every LaTeX user faces the "compatibility nightmare" one day or another. With so much intercession capabilities at hand (LaTeX code being able to redefine itself at will), a time comes inevitably when the compilation of a document fails, due to a class/style conflict. In an ideal world, class/style conflicts should only be a concern for package maintainers, not end-users of LaTeX. Unfortunately, the world is real, not ideal, and end-user document compilation does break.

As both a class/style maintainer and a document author, I tried several times to come up with some general principles or a systematic approach to handling class/style cross-compatibility in a smooth and gentle manner, but I ultimately failed. Instead, one Monday morning, I woke up with this vision of the LaTeX biotope, an emergent phenomenon whose global behavior cannot be comprehended, because it is in fact the result of a myriad of "macro"-interactions between small entities, themselves in perpetual evolution.

In this presentation, I would like to draw bridges between LaTeX and biology, by viewing documents, classes and styles as living beings constantly mutating their geneTeX code in order to survive \renewcommand attacks...