Time to write up how I experienced the Amsterdam Lisp meeting. Summary: had a great time. The combination of gorgeous weather, lots of interesting people, good food, and lisp content might have helped there, I guess.

• Friday was weird. Airports, planes, trains and a hotel that, despite having confirmed my reservation for a room, had to relocate me to another hotel because they were full. After the initial shock of suddenly having a 1/2 hour’s commute to the city center, I spent some time wandering around there and meeting up with a few people (Juho, Antonio Martinez, Tim Daly Jr. and quite a few others) in a cute cafe that happens to serve belgian beer. I had to go back to my room and fall into bed way too early, though. (Hours before midnight!)

• On Saturday, I met up with a few of last night’s lispers to visit the Heineken Museum. That exhibitions reminded me a bit of Duff Gardens, except that it was indoors and lacked the quality of being an intentional parody. Did you know that Heineken engineers once tried to make a brick-shaped beer bottle, so that it could be used as a building block for houses in development countries? Turns out that in the countries they targeted, the sun is so hot that you can’t live in a house made of glass. Their beer trivia terminals tell you that.

  Later, we went to the Van Gogh Museum and looked at the Egon Schiele (gallery) exhibition there (as well as a few pictures by Van Gogh in the main exhibition hall). After that, fetched my digicam and walked from Stadhouderskade to the Kantjil & de Tijger, photographing everything that caught my eye. Had great dinner there (the entire table was covered by plates full of extremely tasty food!) and then went to Robert Strandh’s (and others’, in fact) Hotel to talk about CLIM stuff in the hotel bar. There we heard what I think is the best explanation of incremental redisplay yet. Physical presence of people who understand a concept really helps. (-:

• Sunday was Lispmeet day. I had thought that the people I had seen at saturday’s dinner were the most lispers I had ever met. Imagine my surprise when I wandered into the meeting room. Here’s a list of the most important notes I took during the talks:

  • During the LispWorks talk, I had a few ideas for a CLIM frontend to ASDF defsystems. The first of these ideas is ripping off Lispworks’ defsystem browser. (-:
  • The SLIME talk made me realize (again) how few functions I use in slime. M-x slime-edit-variable and the package apropos function are way cool. Must practice using them.
  • For the sake of our children, I will continue to pronounce climacs as “klee-macs”.
  • Had lunch at a small place called “Lust” with Robert, Kathleen and David Lichteblau. They serve pretty good food and mint tea with real mint. I can’t remember the street name, though. Might have been Runstraat (first crossroad south of the Felix Meritis). Recommended if you’re in Amsterdam. Update (and note to self): Turns out it is Rumstraat. They have a web site, too.
  • I was very impressed by the Linj talk held by Antonio Menezes Leitao. A friend said that compiling a subset of idiomatic lisp to human-readable idiomatic java only makes sense in a world that is very weird already. It is, and so I’m very happy that this project is around to save me from writing java the next time I would normally have to. (-:
  • I won one of the 19 (18?) Practical Common Lisp books that Peter Seibel brought to Amsterdam and signed there! Spent the entire monday afternoon (well, the parts of the afternoon that I didn’t spend sleeping) blissfully reading it.

• Monday was planes and airports again and reading PCL, interrupted by irregular sleeping.

So, yours truly had a very fine weekend just like all the other europlanet.lispers. The only thing I missed was more time to talk to all the extremely interesting people that I met there. I do hope there is going to be another lisp meeting next year! (-: