The Weekly Squeak

On 15/16 May, the workshop on Self-Sustaining Systems (S3) took place at the Hasso-Plattner-Institut in Potsdam. An exciting event at a beautiful place, it featured invited talks by Ian Piumarta, Dan Ingalls, and Richard P. Gabriel, and five presentations of reviewed papers that approached self-sustainment from different angles.

After an opening speech by the HPI director, Prof. Christoph Meinel, the workshop immediately started with Ian Piumarta’s talk on COLA. The ensuing first round of research paper presentations was entirely devoted to Lisp, with Christophe Rhodes presenting the bootstrap process of the SBCL Lisp implementation, and Charlotte Herzeel talking about a fully reflective Lisp.

The first day ended with a boat trip on the Havel lakes around Potsdam, which turned out to be especially beautiful due to the ideal weather conditions (warm, blue sky, soft breeze). Finally, dinner was served in a boat restaurant on the Havel.

Opening the second day, Dan Ingalls gave a demonstration of Lively. This day’s research paper session featured presentations by Carl Friedrich Bolz on the SPy implementation of the Squeak VM using the PyPy tool chain, by Guillermo Adrián Molina on Huemul Smalltalk, and by Theo D’Hondt on the Pico programming language.

After the closing invited talk by Richard P. Gabriel, the official part of the workshop was over, which did not keep the participants from gathering, discussing and hacking.

All talks were recorded and will be made available on the Tele-Task web page. The papers, including those for the invited talks, will be published in Springer’s LNCS series.

Many thanks to Michael Haupt for this report on what must have been a fascinating couple of days.