ILC 09 Pt. 0

Flew into Boston on Monday, arrived at the Stata Center just after the conference lunch. Highlights so far:

Michael Greenberg's lightning talk about TRAC, both for being probably the most well-prepared 5 minute talk ever, and for explaining the key essence (self-modifying code) of pure macro languages. Later during the macros debate Greenberg made the very insightful point that conceptually the Lisp language and Lisp macros are two distinct systems and need to be reasoned about as such.

Joe Marshall's daughter's insight about the subject of his talk: "[continuations are] just autosave for your program!"

Pascal Costanza's superhuman knowledge of Lisp history, wit, and strong opinions.

Some things that have been done to death and should be irrelevant but still managed to be somewhat entertaining: the "future of Lisp" panel and the "are macros bad" debate.