LFE Language Summit Review

Erlang Factory was very kind to assist Robert Virding in setting up the first "language summit" for LFE here at Erlang User Conference in Stockholm. (We use the term "summit" playfully, since it's a very unofficial affair within a small developer community.)

We took notes in an etherpad, but below is a review of what we talked about and the general feel of the session.

We had a nice showing of about 15 to 20 folks who were interested in LFE either as users, developers, language tinkerers, and the curious. The first half of the talk was dedicated to a discussion on maps and changes to the lfe executable that will make it more shell-like.

Additional topics covered:

• A Standard Library for LFE
• Getting to Types in LFE

Topics we didn't get to but will bring up on the mail list:

• An Object System for LFE
• Lazy Evaluation

In general, LFE development is very mellow, done casually in the spare time of the contributors, completely for the fun of it. It was nice to see that the design session reflected that same demeanor, that the character didn't change in a larger group where opinions were being shared. It will be nice to see what the future brings for LFE and how this casual approach scales :-)