Intellectually stimulating: Open-Source Convention

(tags programming, conference, presentation, video)

Two people on my blog reading list pointed out the O'Reilly Open Source Convention 2007 free presentation videos. Just go to that page and start click on the videos to be amazed.

John Lam of IronRuby fame pointed out Microsoft Research and Haskell primary architect Simon Peyton-Jones's talk "Transactional Memory for Concurrent Programming". This talk is pretty much about designing programming languages to give you more abstraction with regards to the upcoming multiprocessing push. Haskell already has this idea, but it sounds similar to an Erlang concept.

Also I watched Ben Fry's "The Processing Development Environment" but making programming easier for non-programmers is not one of my primary interests.

I also stayed for a video by the Intel guys explaining their new open-sourced C++ compiler toolkit in "Outfitting for Multi-core Parallelism". I loved how they had a suit guy and jeans guy. James Reinders as the suit guy adjusts his vocabulary to be receptive to the open-source advocates, despite being head of Marketing of Open-Source Products (or is it just an act?).

But I didn't watch all the videos, and I almost missed a great one if it wasn't for Bryan Murdock's linkage to it "Yegge on Branding (Marketing, eww)". Steve Yegge of the Amazon, Emacs, and lately Rails on Javascript fame, gave a open-ended talk called "How to Ignore Marketing and Become Irrelevant in Two Easy Steps"about creating a successful brand. The biggest problem he claims is that the term "open-source" definition is so loose that it is not an effective brand. As a presenter, Yegge makes me motion sick because he moves around a lot, but nevertheless he is very articulate and spontaneously funny.

In making this post watched them all again, thus making me late to go out. I'm going to have to watch the rest of the videos later.

Lightweight people prefer Ruby and Haruhi

(tags presentation, Ruby, Japanese, English, China, criticism, anime)

Here's a "lightning talk" called "Diligent People. Lightweight people." done by Masayoshi Takahashi, chairman of the Nihon Ruby-no Kai, the Ruby programming language core and libraries developers (and support) group. (Thanks to _why's post "Chairman Takahashi in Taiwan") This is a rare English sample from the mainly Japanese presentation group.

Basically a lightning talk a short 3 minute speech with big kanji Powerpoint-like (or is it Evangalion-type?) visuals, usually on programming topics. Try it out here: "About Nihon Ruby no Kai" (日本Rubyの会について), but don't forget to maximize your browser.

So Takahashi makes an argument for lightweight ("lazy"!) people and processes instead of "diligent" people, but rather than spoil the humor I urge you to watch the video.

I realize when says "lightweight people prefer scripting languages like Ruby" he is expounding the strengths of unit-testing, dynamism, and less documentation, as much as a 3 minute talk can allow.

But his "lightweight people prefer Haruhi (light novel)" is just icing on the cake. He's definately not saying that Ruby is so like last year's anime, ie. old news. Still any programming language that can be associated with making people dance in the streets is novel.