I'm in Potsdam, at the Hasso-Platner Institute, attending the Workshop on Self-Sustaining Systems. Sounds esoteric? I thought so, too, though that didn't stop me from submitting a paper about the build process of Steel Bank Common Lisp and how that affects the user and developer community.

The call for contributions invited

submissions of high-quality papers reporting original research, or describing innovative contributions to, or experience with, self-sustaining systems, their implementation, and their application.

and my paper, as well as the technical details of the SBCL build, essentially argued for considering the user and developer community as part of the system: software is really just a parasite, but its host is not the hardware it's running on, but the humans who allow it to ‘reproduce’. (A related point was made by Ian Piumarta of the Viewpoints Research Institute, about the survival of the species rather than the individual being the important thing, in the talk before mine).

My talk was a bit rushed and confused, I think; it suffered from insufficient preparation time. What I was utterly flabbergasted by was the attendance: I was expecting a complement of about 12 people, maybe mostly the authors and their colleagues. Instead, there were about 70 people at the opening, and while some of those were local PhD students or other easy prey, there were still about 50 people attending the research talks. If I had expected that, I might have adjusted the material and the presentation a little bit, perhaps with a bit more advocacy (a captive audience is valuable, after all!), but at least in response to my audience poll, very few people confessed to being unfamiliar with Lisp, so maybe the advocacy would have been unnecessary.

In any case, I got some fair feedback, and I had the chance to have a nice chat with Kim Rose about the use of Squeak Smalltalk and related tools in education. Luke Gorrie introduced me to some other of his Smalltalk chums – that did seem to be the most popular language, based on a highly informal sample.

Dan Ingalls gave a demo of the Sun Labs Lively Kernel, which frankly makes my idea of writing a web backend for McCLIM simultaneously achievable and passé; a whole Morphic system built on SVG and Javascript, complete with animated stars and clocks with Roman numerals, is just the ticket at 9 o'clock in the morning. “Runs best in Safari 3 or Firefox 3.0 beta 5”.

The other talks were about implementing 3-lisp (a reflective dialect of Lisp), a Squeak VM in PyPy, Huemul Smalltalk, and Pico (an interpreted Lisp). It's very interesting to see the development of these systems; my main problem is that many of the presenters say things like “this implementation is not efficient (yet)” or “this implementation is incomplete at the moment” – this makes it very hard to judge whether the necessary future development will invalidate some of the nice things about the systems, such as their size, speed or dynamicity. I suppose that's in the nature of the research beast, though.

After all that, and some more chats, time to head off home (briefly, to rehearse for Arne's Judgment of Paris in the English Music Festival) before setting off again to Bordeaux and the European Lisp Symbolsium.