The European Common Lisp Meeting will be in Hamburg, on the weekend of September 12 and 13, 2009. I greatly enjoyed last year’s ECLM, in Amsterdam. It’s relaxed and gives you a lot of opportunity to meet great Lisp experts from all over the world. Arthur Lemmens and Edi Weitz did a superb job arranging for entertainment and space, and making sure everyone was happy.
I’m also looking forward to seeing Hamburg; I’ve never been there, and it sounds great.
I’m giving a talk entitled A Highly-Available Large-Scale Transaction Processing System in Common Lisp. It’s about the airline reservation system that we’re building at ITA Software, specifically about the issues involved in using Common Lisp, which is not widely thought of as being a language for writing large-scale transaction processing.
The lightning talks at the International Lisp Conference last March went so well that Edi and Arthur are trying out this format at the ECLM. After the ILC, someone told me that at another sofware-related conference he had been to, the lightning talks fell flat: few people signed up to give talks, and they weren’t very good. At the ILC, I thought they were nearly all great. We learned about new tools, stories, and so on. There was a great one about using Lisp in a Lisp-unfriendly world. In a nutshell: if they force you to program in PERL, then run a PERL-coded Scheme interpreter and write in Scheme! I anticipate more fun lightning talks in Hamburg!
So, I encourage you to join the fun!