October 19, 2005

New Book

lj-mood: happy

I got back to the office this morning and found that the book I'd ordered, Jamie's Italy, had arrived. I've only had time to briefly skim it, but it looks really good and is recipe- and picture-dense. I look forward to reading it, and trying out some of the recipes. It looks like it was worth having it shipped from Europe.

Conference Reports

lj-mood: awake

I spent the last week or so at the Ruby Conference and OOPSLA Conference in San Diego. The Ruby conference had a more grass-roots feel and only one lecture track. Overall it was quite interesting, especially the Rails stuff and the ad-hoc domain specific language stuff. It was also good to see that work was progressing on a byte code compiler for the language, although it's not rocket science and should have been done long ago. I dunno why nobody has bothered yet. (A speaker at OOPSLA pointed out that it's the slowest dynamic language, with a naive implementation, yet people still find it valuable.)

OOPSLA was much more academic. I came away with the vague feeling that it people were a little stuck on the OO stuff and should move on, but there were also a few talks to that effect, so maybe people already know this. The workshop I attended on domain specific modeling was a good experience, although a solid day of academic stuff can be wearying. Sussman's talk and Dave Thomas' talk were both good, too. I think Java Frameworks and over-enginering of tools and libraries has sucked some of the joy out of coding, hopefully we find our way back soon. I think I should skim SICP again sometime soon.

October 17, 2005

Conference

It's late monday. I'm in San Diego for the OOPSLA conference. I snuck
into the domain specific modeling conference with a coworker, which
was a lot of fun, the talks were mostly interesting, and the
discussions afterwards were fun. It's been a long day, though, and I
was too worn out to really read any of the posters at the reception in
the evening. They we went back to my bosses room for a brainstorming
session (which was productive, but tiring).

I'll give a little more context in the next entry, going to bed for now.