European Lisp Symposium 2025

The programme is here!

There are several ways for you to join ELS online:

• Via Twitch: You join https://twitch.tv/elsconf and enjoy the show. If you have a Twitch account, you can also use the text chat to communicate with other participants or the authors. You can also follow the elsconf user on Twitch to receive a notification when each day's broadcast starts.

• Via IRC: You join the #elsconf channel on libera.chat. Messages from this channel are automatically forwarded to the Twitch chat, and vice versa.

• Via Jitsi: The breaks take place on Jitsi (a video chat application that runs in any browser).

The timezone of our schedule is UTC+2. The videos of the streams will stay online for two weeks on Twitch, but will also be available on our YouTube channel. See you online!

Registration

Note: online attendance is free; registration is not requested in that case.

Invited Speakers

• Project Oberon: A Late Appraisal. -- Jürg Gutknecht, prof. em. ETH Zürich

  After ETH's success with Pascal in the 70s programming languages like Modula-2, Oberon and Lola in the 80s and 90s served the purpose of codesigning pioneering personal workstations such as Lilith and Ceres and were also used in teaching generations of students.

• Is Lisp Still Relevant in the New Age of AI? -- Anurag Mendhekar, Paper Culture LLC

  Lisp owes its existence and popularity to early AI research. At one time, the entire AI world revolved around Lisp, which provided an enormous amount of energy for the language’s development and for pioneering technologies in compiler design, language innovation, and high-performance hardware (such as the Connection Machine). However, in today’s AI landscape, Lisp is nowhere to be found. Instead, languages like Python—many of whose ideas are borrowed from Lisp—have become the mainstream tools for modern AI.

  This raises a key question: What made Lisp so relevant during the first AI revolution but seemingly irrelevant in the second? Is there still a place for Lisp in this new AI era? If so, what should the Lisp community focus on to re-enable its relevance?

• Toward safe, flexible, and efficient software in Common Lisp -- Robert Smith

  Common Lisp is renowned for its ability to express safe, flexible, or efficient code. However, these characteristics are often at odds with one another, especially in practical software co-development settings. Coalton is an embedded language within Common Lisp that leverages a Haskell-like type system to prove type safety of a program and performs a variety of type-based optimizations. Coalton also permits new abstractions that are difficult to express in ordinary Common Lisp. We discuss Coalton and its use at two commercial organizations.

Location

Swiss Game Hub https://www.swissgamehub.com/ (CONFERENCE) Erika-Mann Strasse 11 8050 Zürich Switzerland

Hotels

• Hotel Sternen Oerlikon https://www.sternenoerlikon.ch/en (HOTEL) Schaffhauserstrasse 335
• Acasa Suites https://acasasuites.com/en/acasa-suites-zurich.html (HOTEL) Binzmühlestrasse 72
• Radisson Hotel & Suites https://www.radissonhotels.com/en-us/hotels/radisson-hotel-and-suites-zurich (HOTEL) Thurgauerstrasse 116
• Courtyard by Marriott https://www.marriott.com/en-us/hotels/zrhcy-courtyard-zurich-north/overview/ (HOTEL) Max-Bill Platz 19

Organization

Programme Chair

• François-René Rideau Đặng-Vũ Bân François-René Rideau Đặng-Vũ Bân MuKn (PROGRAMME-CHAIR) USA

Organizing Chair

• Didier Verna Didier Verna https://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/ EPITA / LRE (ORGANIZING-CHAIR) France

Local Chair

• Yukari Hafner Yukari Hafner Shinmera [email protected] https://shinmera.com Shirakumo.org (LOCAL-CHAIR VIRTUALIZATION) Switzerland

Committee

Virtualization Team

Programme

Times are local to the conference. You can download the programme in iCalendar format here.

1. 0:00

   May 19th

2. 8:30

   Registration, badges, meet and greet

3. 9:45

   Welcome messages and announcements

4. 10:00

   Keynote - Project Oberon: A Late Appraisal.

   • Jürg Gutknecht, prof. em. ETH Zürich
5. 11:15

   Coffee Break

6. 11:45

   Experience Report - Growing Your Own Lispers

   • Michał Herda
   • Wojciech Gac
7. 12:30

   Lunch

8. 14:00

   Keynote - Toward safe, flexible, and efficient software in Common Lisp

   • Robert Smith
9. 15:15

   Coffee Break

10. 15:45

    Research Paper - The Lisp in the Cellar (remote)

    • Pierre-Evariste Dagand
    • Frédéric Peschanski
11. 16:30

    Research Paper - Programming with Useful Quantifiers

    • Jim Newton
12. 17:15

    Short Break

13. 17:30

    Lightning Talks

14. 19:00

    Banquet (Group 1)

15. 20:00

    Banquet (Group 2)

16. 0:00

    May 20th

17. 8:30

    Registration, badges, meet and greet

18. 9:30

    Announcements

19. 9:45

    Keynote - Is Lisp Still Relevant in the New Age of AI?

    • Anurag Mendhekar, Paper Culture LLC
20. 10:45

    Coffee Break

21. 11:15

    Research Paper - A Brief Perspective on Deep Learning Using Common Lisp

    • Martin Atzmueller
22. 12:00

    Lunch

23. 13:30

    Experience Report - Porting the Steel Bank Common Lisp Compiler and Runtime to the Nintendo Switch

    • Charles Zhang
    • Yukari Hafner
24. 14:15

    Round Table - Lisp and AI

    • Anurag Mendhekar
    • Martin Atzmueller
    • Vsevolod Domkin
    • Gábor Melis
25. 15:00

    Coffee Break

26. 15:30

    Lightning Talks

27. 16:00

    Hackathon

    • Everyone interested