an immense accumulation of commodities

Climacs has quite a few help commands now. The picture above shows Apropos Command (in the lower panel) and Describe Command (in the upper panel).

The interesting thing is that the upper panel was obtained by clicking on the “Kill Line” heading below. And the magic involved?

(present command
         `(command-name :command-table ,command-table)
         :stream out-stream)

when printing and

(define-presentation-to-command-translator describe-command
    (command-name com-describe-command help-table
                  :gesture :select
                  :documentation "Describe command")
    (object)
    (list object))

to make it clickable.

Which just goes to show some of the cool things you get for free if you use CLIM.

The full list of help commands currently available is:

• Apropos Command (C-h a)
• Describe Bindings (C-h b)
• Describe Key Briefly (C-h c)
• Describe Command (C-h f)
• Describe Key (C-h k)
• Where Is (C-h w)

In fact, all these commands are part of ESA, and should therefore be available to any Emacs Style Application written using that framework.

ECLM 2006 was my first Lisp event. In fact, it was my first programming event. I had a great time.

As the other blogging attendees have noted, the presentations were of varying interest. The AllegroGraph presentation was a bit once-over lightly, and never touched upon telecom fraud detection (unless that’s what Osama Bin Laden was wanted for). In contrast to many others I found James Anderson’s talk quite interesting, if only for the “here’s something interesting and perhaps counter-intuitive we found when implementing the system” moments. Arthur Lemmens, Martin Cracauer and David McClain all went for a low key presentation style, which worked with their material and the crowd. But David McClain’s late-night-DJ voice, impressive pictures and fascinating background stole the show.

The most common question in the breaks, asked with the expectation of a negative answer, was “Do you use lisp in your work?”. The negative answer was, of course, forthcoming in the vast majority of cases.

It was fun putting faces to nicks. Andreas Fuchs managed to look nothing at all like antifuchs, for some reason I can’t articulate. Whereas Juho Snellman did look like jsnell. (Christophe Rhodes is never Xophian, because the fangs barely show IRL…).

Many thanks to Edi and Arthur!