Lisp: Research and Experience

In the last couple of years, we have seen a growing interest in the Lisp programming language and its various dialects, including classic ones, like Common Lisp and Scheme, and also brand new ones, like Clojure and Qi. Several user group meetings, workshops and conferences have been organized with great success in recent years, especially in Europe, but also elsewhere.

With the European Lisp Symposium, we aim to start a series of annual events that is especially suitable for novel research results, but also for insights and lessons learned from practical applications and education perspectives, all involving Lisp dialects. The first symposium was organized in Bordeaux, France, on May 22 and 23, 2008.

For this symposium, we have received 15 submissions, and after a careful review process, the program committee selected seven of them for presentation at the main track of the symposium. The program committee considered six of these papers worthy of being invited for a journal publication. Their authors submitted extended versions of these papers, and after another thorough review process with additional reviewers, these papers have indeed reached the necessary level of quality and maturity.

These papers are now finally published in a special issue Lisp: Research and Experience of the Journal of Universal Computer Science.

Preparations for the 2nd European Lisp Symposium to be held in Milan, Italy, May 27-29, 2009 are already under way...