Sunday, October 25, 2009

OOPSLA 2009, Day 1: Sunday

Sunday's activities for me consisted of going to the VMIL workshop, which was quite interesting, and a tutorial on "realizing the benefits of functional programming in object oriented code." I was only able attend the morning session of VMIL, which was basically their invited talks on the VMIL website. They were all decent talks. It was especially interesting to hear about Maxine, which I had seen briefly mentioned on reddit some time ago.

Unfortunately, though I was looking forward the tutorial (which I was obligated to attend as the student volunteer on duty), it turned out to be somewhat disappointing. The concepts were not new to me, so I was probably not the target audience. C# actually has a Func type that corresponds to the Java version presented in the tutorial, and I'd seen currying in C# from previous investigations. I hadn't seen Java-style continuations before, but after lectures by Olivier Danvy on continuations this summer, the code was not too surprising. Nonetheless, the code was still interesting to see, as I am always fascinated by how other people program.

I think the most disappointing part was how little discussion there was on the benefits of shoving functional-style code (which isn't exactly pretty, in Java) into an OOPL, and deeper case studies into performance/safety benefits, etc. There was the obvious discussion about referential transparency and so on, but I'm looking for more than just some buzzwords.

The presenter was a little bit disorganized and lacking in presenter skills (tangential expositions, extremely small writing), but we all have our faults, and I'm sure he can improve in time. It is clear that he likes the subject, but not immediately clear that he likes talking about it. I am, of course, not being literal, since if he didn't like talking about it, he obviously wouldn't have volunteered to do the tutorial.

Overall, I was satisfied with the first day, since VMIL was nice, and the tutorial wasn't a total waste.

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