programming musings

On December 3 and 4 of 2004, the Computer Science Department at Indiana University hosted a conference on the occasion of Dan Friedman’s sixtieth birthday. It brought together many of his former and present students, colleagues, research collaborators, co-authors and friends. That is, it brought together many of the big names in the Lisp/Scheme community (not in vain Shriram Krishnamurthi once imagined the Scheme community “a brotherhood of Dan”). Guy Steele delivered a one hour keynote, which was followed by more than twenty half-an-hour talks by people like Sussman, Dybvig, Shivers or Kiselyov, just to name a few.

The extremely good news is that, in the conference’s webpage, one can find the videos for almost all these talks! So, don’t be surprised if i’m missing during a few days! Besides the obvious interest in their contents, i’ll also find amusing to connect names with faces (it’s funny how one makes up fictitious faces for the authors of papers one reads and re-reads)… how many of them do you recognise?:

(I admire the work of many of these people, and i was convinced i wouldn’t be able to single out one among them… but to my surprise, and with all due respect to all schemers, i can: to my amusement, one of the participants is one of my few personal heroes. I’m not sure about the connection between him and Dan, but i’m very pleased to know there’s one. Surely you can spot this (to me, at least) rara avis?)