Wednesday Oct 26, 2005

In the Clutches of the Venue

I was at OOPSLA last week. While the conference venue left someting to be desired, I thought the conference was more interesting than it has been in a few years.  There was a very interesting presentation about Croquet (a framework for building and interacting in distributed 3D virtual worlds).

A lot of programming language work. My favorite was the paper on Scala , Martin Odersky’s programming language. Scala is one of the nicest and most powerful languages around, and runs on a JVM as well. It has a lot of really nice features - purely object oriented, closures, mixins, a powerful type system, a powerful notion of modularity, and it interoperates well with the Java platform.

I also gave a presentation on bit rot at the dynamic languages symposium.