I'm happy to announce the first public release of Clon, the Command-Line Options Nuker library for Common Lisp.

Clon currently requires SBCL to work. If you want to help porting it to other implementations, 'grep PORTME **/*' in the sources.

Get it here.

Clon is a library for managing command-line options in standalone Common Lisp applications. It provides a unified option syntax with both short and long names, automatic completion of partial names and automatic retrieval/conversion of option arguments from the command-line, associated environment variables, fallback or default values. Clon comes with a set of extensible option types (switches, paths, strings etc.). Clon also provides automatic generation and formatting of help strings, with support for highlighting on tty's through ISO/IEC 6429 SGR. This formatting is customizable through "themes".

When the C++ guys announced support for lambda expressions in the upcoming version of the standard (assuming there's one), I refrained from blogging on the "better 30 years late than never" melody.

Now I got big news for you guys. Today, everybody likes dynamic types. They even dare saying so at ECOOP (which means that ECOOP now accepts those papers, yeah things change).

This year, we had a short introduction to an empirical study about the positive (or at least not negative -- one step at a time, this is still ECOOP --) impact of dynamic typing on the development process. And, cherry on the cake, we had this Microsoft guy who presented a paper about... supporting dynamic types in C# !!

In short, the guy said that he wants to be as fashionable and cool as the people doing all sorts of fancy stuff with their scripting languages (he also said that this was a demand from the C# community).

So that's it. A couple years ago, people suddenly realized that functional programming and, in particular, lambda expressions were a good thing. Today, people are also starting to realize that dynamic typing is a good thing.

So after having endured 30 years of sarcasm about our dynamic types, it's only fair that we, the dynamic languages community, get to be sarcastic now.

***********************************************************************
*                                                                     *
*                  International Lisp Conference 2010                 *
*                         October 19-21, 2010                         *
*                    John Ascuaga's Nugget (Casino)                   *
*              Reno/Sparks, Nevada, USA (near Lake Tahoe)             *
*                                                                     *
*           Collocated with SPLASH 2010 (OOPSLA & DLS & more)         *
*               see also http://splashcon.org as well as              *
*          http://www.dynamic-languages-symposium.org/dls-10/         *
*                                                                     *
*              In association with ACM SIGPLAN (PENDING)              *
*                                                                     *
***********************************************************************


The Association of Lisp Users is pleased to announce that the 2010
International Lisp Conference will be held in Reno, Nevada, in
collocation with SPLASH 2010.  The scope includes all areas related to
the Lisp family of programming languages.

Accepted papers will be published in the ACM Digital Library (PENDING).

Extended Abstracts and Papers must be written in English and submitted
electronically at http://www.easychair.org/conferences?conf=ilc2010 in
PDF or WORD format. If an Extended Abstract is submitted, it must be
between 2 and 4 pages, with full paper to follow before final deadline.

Final submissions must not exceed 15 pages and need to use the ACM
format, for which templates which can be found at:
    http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html.


Important Dates:
****************

 * Deadline for Abstract Submission      August      1, 2010
 * Deadline for Paper Submission         September   6, 2010
 * Author notification                   September  20, 2010
 * Final paper due (in electronic form)  October     5, 2010
 * Conference                            October 19-21, 2010


Scope:
******

Lisp is one of the greatest ideas from computer science and a major
influence for almost all programming languages and for all
sufficiently complex software applications.

The International Lisp Conference is a forum for the discussion of
Lisp and, in particular, the design, implementation and application of
any of the Lisp dialects.  We encourage everyone interested in Lisp to
participate.

We invite high quality submissions in all areas involving Lisp
dialects and any other languages in the Lisp family, including, but
not limited to, ACL2, AutoLisp, Clojure, Common Lisp, ECMAScript,
Dylan, Emacs Lisp, ISLISP, Racket, Scheme, etc.

Topics may include any and all combinations of Lisp and:

 * Language design and implementation
 * Language critique
 * Language integration, inter-operation and deployment
 * Applications (especially commercial)
 * 'Pearls' (of wisdom)
 * Experience reports and case studies
 * Reflection, meta-object protocols, meta-programming
 * Domain-specific languages
 * Programming paradigms and environments
 * Parallel and distributed computing
 * Software evolution
 * Theorem proving
 * Scientific computing
 * Data mining
 * Semantic web

We also encourage submissions about known ideas as long as they are
presented in a new setting and/or in a highly elegant way.

Authors concerned about the appropriateness of a topic may communicate
by electronic mail with the program chair prior to submission.

Each paper should explain its contributions in both general and
technical terms, identifying what has been accomplished, explaining
why it is significant, and comparing it with previous work. Authors
should strive to make their papers understandable to a broad audience.
Each paper will be judged according to its significance, novelty,
correctness, clarity, and elegance.

The official language of the conference is English.  Some further
information is available at the conference web site, with more details
added later.  See: http://www.international-lisp-conference.org

Technical Program:
******************

Original submissions in all areas related to the conference themes are
invited for the following categories.

 * Papers: Technical papers of up to 15 pages that describe original
   results or explain known ideas in new and elegant ways, or extended
   abstracts of 4 pages soon followed by the corresponding full paper.

 * Demonstrations: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for demonstrations of
   tools, libraries, and applications.

 * Tutorials: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for in-depth presentations
   about topics of special interest for at least 90 minutes and up to
   180 minutes.

 * Workshops: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for groups of people who
   intend to work on a focused topic for half a day.

 * Panel discussions: Abstracts of up to 4 pages for discussions about
   current themes. Panel discussion proposals must mention panel
   members who are willing to partake in a discussion.

 * Lightning talks: Abstracts of up to one page for talks to last for
   no more than 5 minutes.

Depending on the technical content, each submitted paper will be
classified by the program committee as either a technical paper or as
an experience paper; and authors will be informed about this
classification.  Note that all interesting submissions are considered
valuable contributions to the success of the ILC series of
conferences.  As in past ILC's since 2007, accepted papers in both
categories will be presented at the conference, included in the
proceedings, and submitted to the ACM digital library.


Organizing Committee:
*********************

 * General Chair:
   JonL White          The Ginger IceCream Factory of Palo Alto, ALU

 * Program Chair:
   Antonio Leitao      Instituto Superior Tecnico/INESC-ID

 * Conference Treasurer:
   Duane Rettig        Franz, Inc., ALU Director

 * Publicity Chair:
   Daniel Herring      ALU Director

 * ALU Treasurer:
   Rusty Johnson       TASC, Inc., ALU Director


Program Committee:
******************

 * Antonio Leitao      Instituto Superior Tecnico/INESC-ID, Portugal
 * Alex Fukunaga       University of Tokyo, Japan
 * Charlotte Herzeel   Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
 * Christophe Rhodes   Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK
 * Didier Verna        EPITA Research and Development Laboratory, France
 * Duane Rettig        Franz, Inc., USA
 * Giuseppe Attardi    University of Pisa, Italy
 * Jeff Shrager        Symbolic Systems Program, Stanford University, USA
 * Joe Marshall        Google, Inc., USA
 * Julian Padget       University of Bath, UK
 * Keith Corbet        Clozure Associates, USA
 * Kent Pitman         PTC, USA
 * Manuel Serrano      INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France
 * Marc Feeley         University of  Montreal, Canada
 * Marie Beurton-Aimar University of Bordeaux 1, France
 * Mark Stickel        SRI International, USA
 * Matthias Felleisen  Northeastern University, USA
 * Scott McKay         ITA Software, USA


Contacts:
*********

 * Questions:         ilc10-organizing-committee at alu.org

 * Program Chair:     ilc2010 at easychair.org

For more information, see http://www.international-lisp-conference.org

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.