Dear Logic Programmers,

Welcome to the May 2005 issue of the ALP Newsletter.

Great news are coming from the organization of ICLP; looks like this year we are going to have a truly exceptional program. Obviously, the charisma of Gopal and Maurizio, and the beauty of Sitges have sorted the desired effect - ICLP has received  close to 100 submissions! Six workshops have been approved, and they will surely provide topics of interest for most of us - they range from the 'good old' CICLOPS and WLPE to brand new ones (e.g., Bioinformatics). And along with the workshops we are going to have the traditional poster session and the new Doctoral Consortium (the deadline for both these events is June 1st).

The large and excellent pool of submissions to ICLP is a refreshing sign that logic programming is alive and well. I just would like to hope that this message will get out of the LP community and reach the other communities in a strong manner. I cannot stop being amazed of the uncomfortable reputation that logic programming receives within certain academic environments - just last week I had the opportunity to see results from a proposal panel review of the National Science Foundation, where a proposal was rejected on the basis that (I quote) "The motivation for such a study that is suggested from logic programming languages does not seem especially strong as these languages are not widely used." and "Nonetheless, LP remains a relatively niche programming style useful
for only a limited range of problems, so the impact of better LP systems is not as large as would be improvements in more widely used programming styles."
I would really like to challenge the LP community to make an effort to change this perspective. LP is much more than a "niche area" and it is not "useful for only a limited range of problems", but clearly we, as a community, have somewhere failed to adequately disseminate our contributions. Perhaps, this would be an interesting issue that the ALP EC could try to address in the near future.
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To bring this one to closure, I would like once again to welcome your comments/critics/suggestions/... on how you would like to see the ALP Newsletter evolve in the near and not-so-near future.

           ‘till the next one.

                                   Enrico