Fun in the afternoon is a designed to be a relaxed programming semair, and being bored I went along. It was pretty good, with all the talks being quite relaxed and interesting. Phil Wadler's Talk was of some interest, since I hate PHP and the other web programming things I have tried, including haskell-html and Kaya arent quite ready yet.
The other three talks were quite good. All discussed new things, and there was a lot of "I don't quite know" in reply to the tough questions. The Metatheory stuff was fun, though I haven't done anything like enough type theory to need it. The Version Control stuff was quite cool, and it would be nice to see that become a real tool, similar to darcs. Andrew Kennedy's take on C# was interesting, though he admitted beforehand that he didn't quite belive it himself. It lead to a lot of muttering between Edwin and Myself as to what a functional langauge really was. Its interesting how all the academics revert back to their undergrad days: reading the paper, talking, playing on laptops, being late, sitting at the back and eating.
It was also nice to put some faces to names, including Neil Mitchell and Conor McBride Its also nice to see how many people were there, and that people wanted to go have a drink afterwards. That evening I caught up with Dan, and its nice to see he is settling into his new job well.
I caught the train home in the morning, getting in at three, and managed to watch the rugby before sleeping for 15 hours, a result of not sleeping week for 8 days before that.
posted at: 04:16 | path: /computing | permanent link to this entry