TITLE: OOPSLA Is Over
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 28, 2004 7:30 PM
DESC: OOPSLA always seems to end to soon.
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BODY:
My access to wireless at OOPSLA is coming to a close. I have
a few ideas burning in my mind to be written about, but they
will have to wait until I have time while traveling home
tomorrow. For now, let me just say good-bye to the conference.
At the beginning of his talk, which I
wrote about earlier,
Ward said: OOPSLA is about programming on the edge, doing practical
things better than most.
In a panel on the second day, Ralph said that, in some ways,
objects were just the excuse for OOPSLA, not the reason. The
real reason was hanging around with people doing interesting
things, especially people interested in talking about and
studying real programs.
OOPSLA is a unique conference for the sort of people it attracts.
I had the honor of lunching with
David Ungar
today, and he asked everyone, "What has inspired you this
work? What do you want to rush home and work on?" The
best thing you can say about a conference is that it does
inspire you to hurry home and explore some new problem or
approach, or write a new program. OOPSLA does that for me
every year. I'll take time to write down tomorrow how OOPSLA
has inspired me, but for now I can at least say that
examples play a big role in my answer. Well, at
least one of my answers.
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