Well, it seems to get a little more boring, but perhaps the more interesting sessions were all scheduled on the other days :) The talks we visited today are more of the philosophical nature. For one it is nice to see that there are important and recognized people thinking about the very abstract nature what software actually tries to accomplish, but compared to research papers these are simply out of this world and have – at least right now – no practical consequences at all.
Even the research papers presented here sometimes seem to be so far away to solve any implementation problem. We (Alex and I) wonder how it feels when you will be visiting the Oopsla year after year. Essentially assuming that the progress made seems rather disappointing.
From a theoretical concept to a working implementation and then to a widely acceptance, you need to accept some decades to pass by. There are exceptions of course, but comparing the (active) life time of a person to these processes seem to be frustrating. I personally hoped otherwise, and simply can not get used to this slow moving elephant in the room which software development always seems to be.
Initially thought boring but then very funny was a Demo of Visual Basic 9 which Erik Meijer from Microsoft gave. This language is even more pragmatic then C#, it even supports inline XML, of which I never ever though a language designer could do this to a language.
<yours>
armin
</yours>