
SBCL20 in Vienna - tosh
https://lispblog.xach.com/post/189764932688/sbcl20-in-vienna
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triska
This is really cool!

Notably, the venue of this conference was the _Bundesrechenzentrum_ (Austrian
Federal Computing Center), abbreviated as BRZ, the strategic technology
partner of the Austrian public sector where many IT applications and
e-government services are developed and hosted:

[https://www.brz.gv.at/en/](https://www.brz.gv.at/en/)

I work in the public sector and have had the great pleasure to work with
Philipp Marek, who hosted this conference, and many of his colleagues already
in several projects where Lisp was used to achieve impressive and also fast
results.

Currently, I am leading a project in the Federal Ministry for Digital and
Economic Affairs where — in close cooperation with the BRZ as our contractor,
and also with other ministries and organizations — we are using symbolic AI
techniques to deduce and show suitable _grants_ for businesses, based on
logical rules and criteria. The eventual goal of these developments is to
automatically suggest fitting grants in the Business Service Portal
(usp.gv.at), the Austrian e-government platform for businesses.

The BRZ team presented a first draft of the rule-based DSL for encoding
eligibility requirements, specified as Lisp forms, already in the project
kick-off (i.e., first) meeting. This shows that Lisp is very suitable for fast
prototyping, and will be an excellent language to implement the logic we need
in this project.

In the public sector, we are especially interested in symbolic AI methods, to
ensure traceability and explainability of decisions. Lisp and Prolog
programmers are especially needed for these projects, and it is great to see
that the BRZ fosters these developments by hosting such conferences and
already using these languages in several projects.

~~~
woodson
Thanks for sharing, that’s very interesting! Are Lisp and/or Prolog used in a
lot of projects in the public sector in Österreich? From what I’ve heard, many
(most?) projects at BRZ use Java or C# stacks.

~~~
triska
I cannot speak for the entire public sector or the BRZ.

However, Lisp has already played an important role in two projects I led, and
it also plays an important role in the project I mentioned which is currently
ongoing.

Prolog is used for example in a theorem prover for deontic logic developed by
Björn Lellmann at TU Wien:

[http://subsell.logic.at/bprover/deonticProver/](http://subsell.logic.at/bprover/deonticProver/)

In cooperation with Björn, we have used this solver to showcase the
formalisation and automated application of _legislation_. For a prototype,
Björn has formulated a few paragraphs of the _Studienförderungsgesetz_ (a law
regulating student grants) in deontic logic, and demonstrated that this
theorem prover can be used to automate various decisions because they can be
deduced as stringent logical consequences of existing regulations.

Generally, I think that as the tasks we want to solve become more challenging
and encompassing, high-level languages such as Lisp and Prolog will be
increasingly needed.

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pjmlp
Nice to see that Siscog continues to be a Lisp shop.

If any Lisp hackers feel like moving to Porto or Lisbon, give it a shot.

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reikonomusha
The SBCL20 workshop page las lots of nice info and links too:
[http://www.sbcl.org/sbcl20/](http://www.sbcl.org/sbcl20/)

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mark_l_watson
I saw Zach post this on Twitter early this morning. Great write up to SBCL
Common Lisp’s 20 year anniversary celebration and conference. I wish I had
gone.

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capableweb
As someone who have wanted to pick up SBCL for some years now, what would be
the best getting started resource? The website seems to go through the
installation and only have some sort of reference, which might be a too hard
to chew in the beginning.

~~~
vindarel
It would be the collaborative Cookbook now:
[https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/getting-
started.h...](https://lispcookbook.github.io/cl-cookbook/getting-started.html)

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msamwald
> Steel Bank Common Lisp (SBCL) is a high performance Common Lisp compiler.

