Great, this year I finally made it to the conference that is really is about the core of software development. The Oopsla conference taking place in Montreal, Canada.
Today is the first official day at the conference and it turns out to be a real experience. The speakers and the audience are a fine selection of software enthusiasts that take their job seriously and all want to improve the currently not so optimistic situation in software development. The topics turned out to be:
- Extending Java with feature xy, as every year. A movement which finally also receives a number of flames.
- Bringing the dynamic languages together with statically typed languages… well this is an interpretation by me, but there are first tries to compile down dynamic languages to static code and the other way around to support dynamic typing in (previously) statically typed languages.
- There needs to be done something about the concurrency problem, for which is seems that there is absolutely no solution right now. But one comment by Anders Hejlsberg may bring us a step further: “There are many types of concurrency, we may need to address them individually”.
- .NET is taking over the world, an inspiring and very enthusiastic Jim Hugunin presented his IronPython implementation that is based on the DLR and running in Silverlight.
- The rise of a number of systems that use “predicated dynamic inheritance”, which was a novel idea to me. And I think it may really have some impact. It was introduced in the language Cecil and used in Ambient and SuperGlue.
- and new: live languages, partly similar to my own private research.
Check back for more the next days,
yours
armin