OOPSLA

I just got back from this year's OOPSLA in Vancouver. I didn't really know what to expect since it was my first conference but for the most part it was pretty interesting. I thought the talks on garbage collection were pretty interesting, I'd never really spent anytime thinking about it before but I guess it's the future so I should probably spend more time with it. Alan Kay was the Keynote Speaker and this years Turing Award winner. His talk was great. We also heard from C++ guru Herb Sutter and fellow amazonian Al Vermuelan.

The other talk I really liked was the panel discussion titled "Math/Science vs. Art/Craft" where the panel discussed the nature of Computer Science. It was brought up many times that it's not a science because nothing with the word 'science' in its name is really a science (library science, social science, christian science). I'll try to talk more about it later but what I really got from it was that we should read source code, critique it, and read other people's critiques just like people do with literature and we should practice everyday just like as if it was soccer or a musical instrument. I think maybe the reason we have all of the shitty software out there is because people can't learn from other people mistakes or even their good code because we don't spend anytime analyzing it. Maybe if we spent time reading good code like authors read good books we might get better at creating good code ourselves.