Dreamsongs Wiki

MakeaNewConference

We will almost certainly never get ACM to agree to some of the radical suggestions, and it is likely that OOPSLA will eventually go the way of what used to be my favorite conference: Lisp and Functional Programming. The story of that conference is enlightening as well as depressing.

In the 1980s, Lisp was relatively as popular and interesting as Java is today. We don't like to think about it, but AI was hot and Lisp was on every computer that ran (except, interestingly, PCs - no customers doing AI applications wanted to use them for this [Not]). There were 5 or 6 Lisp software companies and 5 Lisp machine companies (including Xerox and TI). There was a conference called Lisp and Functional Programming, and Steele and I started a journal called Lisp and Symbolic Computation.

At that time, functional programming was nearly dead. There were hardly any papers in the conference or journal from the hardcore of that community. The Lisp folks didn't want to give up on those folks and their work, so we kept soliticting papers from them and trying to help out. The organizing committee for LFP talked explicitly about this.

In the 1990s, Lisp started to decline. The leaders of the functional programming side came to be in the majority of the "in crowd," and they eventually changed the names of the outlets to "International Conference on Function Programming" (ICFP) and "Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation" (HOSC). They promised to treat the Lisp people as they had been treated, but they actually didn't follow through. Now these two outlets are as theoretical as you can get-POPL is the "experience" conference for them.

MF says
This is inaccurate. I was a part of the group that established ICFP. At the time, I mostly published in LFP and considered myself a Mostly Functional Scheme Programmer, but I kept an eye on FP. -- The full story: There were two conferences at the time: LFP (mostly LISPers in the broad sense of the world) and FPCA (somewhat smaller, mostly FP people). After LISP rapidly declined in the industrial world (not LFP's fault), the two conferences became equals and natural partners, with a good overlap of attendees. It was just natural to merge the two, without merging the two Journals that went with them (JFP and LASC/HOSC). The promise

was to treat the various large language groups equally, but in everyone's mind

Scheme represented LISP. I believe that for several years, we (Schemers) didn't get the appropriate treatment and started the Scheme and FP workshop so that we have an alternative (SFP). After almost no Schemer showed up at some ICFPs they woke up. -- So if you want to think of the analogy, study it carefuly. EON

rpg says
I was part of the group that established ICFP, perhaps before MF was. I was reporting the conversation I had with Bob Harper in the lobby of the conference hotel in Orlando in 1994 where we initially agreed to merge L&FP and FPCA. If it was in everyone's mind that Scheme represented Lisp, this fact was deliberately concealed by Harper from me, because as part of everyone who also included numerous Common Lispers sitting in the lobby at the same time, it was not in mine, much as I love Scheme. The promise to treat Lisp well was made by Harper as part of the deal to get me to endorse the idea. Perhaps after initially not following through, they did.
EON

MF says
Same hotel lobby. The difference: I had just spent a year on sabbatical with Harper. I knew what he meant with "LISP". (To his credit, he programmed a

lot with LISP at Cornell for PRL and friends.) I didn't attend two of the last three ICFPs just to

make a point. That expresses my feelings better than anything else I can think of. Same for POPL, after publishing for 10 years in a row there. EON

I can see this happening to OOPSLA. And perhaps we should allow it to happen and aim to start another conference along the lines of the radical suggestions. I wish someone on the OOPSLA Steering Committee or SIGPLAN would comment on this Wiki. -rpg

Well, I'm on the OOPSLA Steering Committee, but I can't comment on anything "officially" as the position of the steering committee is supposed to be consensus (the dictionary definition of consensus is general agreement : UNANIMITY), but in practice is isn't. New thoughts get very short shrift. We don't walk the talk.

The one sliver of hope here is that SIGPLAN is starting to realize they've lost their golden goose. They may be interested in change, but I'm not very hopeful that they are investing patient capital into OOPSLA. They're much more likely to be putting their patient capital into NEW CONFERENCES not dying ones... -- RonCrocker

Does this mean you would suggest we try to think of a new conference that would have the audience that we know and love, and the topics and new directions we find interesting, rather than trying to rehabiliitate OOPSLA? -rpg

Which audience do you mean that we ''know and love''?

Those on this wiki? or the 3000+ men (mostly) who turn up to hear what we have to say (half :-) (see Diagnoses).

From my time on the Steering Committee, I'm going to have to vote for thinking of a new conference rather than rehabilitating OOPSLA. I believe the form of OOPSLA has outlived its milleu but that ACM has not realized this yet. Thus ACM is continuing to try to resurrect the "brand" without realizing the conference world is a different place. I think that the people gathered on this wiki are interested in the "interesting ideas" side of what OOPSLA was; OOPSLA is not that anymore (with the exception of the Onward! track, which should, IMHO, by the core of the new conference I'm talking about). --BjornFreemanBenson

I regret that I agree with Bjorn, in my experience the Steering Committee. ACM/SIGPLAN see OOPSLA as a stable milk cow to fund other ventures and have made little investment or showed little interest in supporting an expanded lively venue that we would all enjoy.

-- DaveThomas

Do other folks who have been Steering Committee members agree? -rpg

I added a note to Dick's description on the history of LFP. See above MF says inside of the first post. --MatthiasFelleisen

As did I, under rpg says. This internecine battle between Lisp and function programming and broken promises is perhaps illuminating. -rpg

The Lisp/Harper story is probably illuminating. Harper, for whom I have a lot of respect - and I actually like the guy - was a liar in the episode I described. Matthias knew the lie but I didn't. He was (and is, I suppose) interested in the most academic of trappings (since he's been trapped by them). People who are keen on retaining or refining the academic respectability of a conference (especially after they have published there and the respectability is effectively retroactive) will go (often unconsciously) to great lengths to - I hate to say it - serve their own purposes. Harper meant Scheme when he said Lisp (coincidentally to a guy who understands Lisp when he hears Lisp), and he said he would treat the Lisp community well, meaning the Scheme community, meaning the theoretical Scheme community, meaning the FP community, meaning his community, because everyone understands that "Lisp" is an odd linguistic quirk for "Scheme" for "FP" for "Harper". Except me. I don't think Harper was trying to be misleading in this, and I expect he would be surprised by my rendition of the story. My point is that being tuned in to the needs and concerns of others is hard to do, especially for the high-asperger's crowd - to which most of us belong. -rpg

Note: I object to "liar". This word is thrown around a lot in this country

these days, but those who throw it are often not in the best position to do so.

With the rest of your post, you have hit the nail on the head, however.

If you're not tuned in, you can't create a thing that is "popular" and "fashionable"

and attracts the "cool people" to some new or old conference. [Personally, I have

never cared about the coolness factor, which is why I am still pushing Scheme

and why I think FP is the best way to do OOP, and so on. But that's irrelevant here.]

-- Matthias

The lying is an important part of the story. I'm certain Harper didn't lie in his own mind (which was why I said he wasn't trying to be misleading). But the effect was the same as a lie because of the difference in understanding, which is the point. As OOPSLA becomes more of an academic's conference, we will be trying to work with people to make it a better conference who will believe that hardcore research activities are central and they will use terms that we might interpret one way but they intend in another narrow way. Just the way that I wanted to see experiential papers in the new ICFP - meaning Lisp practice papers - and Harper probably thought I was talking about papers using that practical language Scheme which is a sort of Lisp. I know Harper meant well, but because our language drifted past each other in the night in the hotel lobby, I expected one thing and he expected another. And since he was more in charge than I was, it worked out his way.

We can see this playing now in OOPSLA, which is following the same arc that L&FP did. -rpg

Yes, except that OOPSLA still has - what - at least a thousand attendees expected this year? And if only 500 turn up SIGPLAN will probably consider the whole thing a failure and chop the lot? Whether or not we MakeaNewConference, there's still the issue of to whom we appeal. I guess one question in the L&FP/ICFP story is: why didn't you keep the streams separate or just co-locate or federate?

Otherwise it does seem that, over, time research prestige (I'm still struggling to find a term that includes both traditional academe and corporate research) and the culture and infrastructure that entails, for whom publication is essential will swamp practitioners for whom publication is mostly accidental.

Here's an intresting thought: the collorary of ResearchDominatesTechnicalProgramme is that ConsultantsDominatePanels.

--JamesNoble

Between 1988 and 1994, when the talks in Orlando took place, LFP had shrunk;

its industrial support had disappeared im 1988. (I re-started the tradition of industrial support money in 1998 as general chair. I.e. it took 10 years for industrial labs to notice us again.) The people who published at LFP had a large overlap with the people who published at FPCA. Academics thought LISP had succeeded with COMMON LISP and no longer needed or wanted an academic conference. I can't speak for the LISP people in industry; I don't know why most of them stayed away, whether it was there weren't any anymore or whether the conference just didn't matter to them. I talked to John McCarthy (in the lobby of the same hotel) and he said that this conference now felt like "lambda calculus theoreticians met compiler hackers on a windy day".

I believe that most people in this hotel lobby wanted a regular conference on FP techniques in LISP, Scheme, ML, Haskell, etc to survive as their "academic home". Running two distinct conferences was felt to be a distraction. Running two tracks within one conference didn't really come up. I must admit that the "typed FP" people looked at LISP and to some extent Scheme as a "dinosaur phenomenon" that had little or nothing to tell the rest of the world. The Schemers wanted to survive somewhere and it looked impossible to do with the LISPers.

In 1998, as general chair of ICFP, I contacted the LISP meeting people and explored whether they were interested in colocating with ICFP. At that point, there seemed to be no interest. In 2003, they invited me as one of their keynote speakers to NYC. The conference organization left such a bad impression on me, however, that I didn't think there was much a point though distance in time seems to improve the impression.

So this is as far as I am concerned the story of the demise of LFP. ICFP is doing okay as is. Not great not horrible for an academic conference. But I must admit I miss the exchange with enlightened industrial people, especially considering what I am doing now.

-- Matthias