Wednesday, June 23, 2010

ECOOP day 1

So, other than the crap wifi and an absence of snacks with coffee, the conference has been going well. There are many more people here than expected, it's not as quiet as many of us had feared. The Habakuk is a fairly good venue, the main conference room is nice, with desks, but crap wifi. The summer school room is a bit how and air-less, but has marginally better wifi (but still uselessly bad). Lunch is good, although it could have more vegetarian options (there seems little point in asking about dietary needs at registration if you are not going to bother making any dedicated food for said needs).

Anyway, Shriram gave another talk about Javascript --- this time about a core calculus, interesting they had actually implemented the de-sugar-er and operational semantics so could execute Javascript using their formalism.

I really wanted to see Gavin Bierman's talk on dynamic types for C# --- he is always a great speaker. Unfortunately I went on a mission to buy some new t-shirts at lunchtime (due to the relative pricing of a new t-shirt v. having a single t-shirt laundered at my hotel) and got lost. As compensation to myself I had a delicious blueberry gelatto.

I attended Andrew Kennedy's summer school session on unit types in F#, it was a good session with lots of interesting theoretical stuff about unit types (I couldn't believe there was so much to talk about them). I guess though, I would have preferred more on these interesting details (Andrew skipped quite a few slides), and a bit less on F# itself.

I would have liked to have seen the talks on "Verifying Generics and Delegates" and (especially after Shriram's plug yesterday) "Recency Types for Analysing Scripting Languages", but these clashed with the summer school. This was a shame, I believe they could have scheduled this better (there are other clashes later in the week too).

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