May 11-12, 2026. I had the chance to attend the European Lisp Symposium 2026. This was the 19th conference in its series on the Lisp family of programming languages.
Despite being productive with Lisp for the past 8 years, my interactions with other Lispers have been primarily online. Seeing the faces behind several of the programmers I deeply admire, having breakfast, lunch, dinner, a small mini-cruise, and lots of bickering, ranting, and venting about the broader state of programming, as well as the more day to day realities of life and programming jobs, has been an incredibly interesting way to connect with people. These were remarkable two days. Memorable for years to come.
PS: If you are an ELS 2026 attendee, and want some cruise photos, feel free to drop me an email.
What is Lisp? Lisp is a programmable programming language. In simpler words, it’s a very expressive programming language. This allows it to express complex ideas in simpler terms.
Have you ever wished* the programming language you work with had a certain feature, but it did not? For example, may be you wished for the switch statement and match syntaxes before python 3.10. Well, with lisp, you could have written it yourself in a few 10s of lines without waiting for several years for the idea to be approved by some central committee. There are many such examples.
*A problem with wishing is that if you stop wishing, you stop wishing. The weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language influences the way one thinks. In other words, if you program in an impoverished programming language for too long, you lose touch with your imagination. The language delineates your canvas and your tools. Doing something outside the language becomes harder to think if not unthinkable. The only way to undo that damage might be to plunge yourself into a new way of thinking by learning a language outside your comfort zone. Pick up a Lisp, a Forth, a Haskell, or may be Scala or some other language with ideas that have stood the test of time
For my day to day requirements in cognitive science experiments and modeling, I roam around javascript, python, R as and when need arises. But I cannot help but cringe over their prolonged use. And that’s not to say Lisp is without limitations. We have had our own share of detractors who wanted more power than Lisp and decided to build their own languages :).