TITLE: OOPSLA This and That, Part 2 AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: October 20, 2005 6:46 PM DESC: ----- BODY: As always, OOPSLA has been a constant font of ideas. But this year's OOPSLA seems to have triggered even more than its usual share. I think that is a direct result of the leadership of Dick Gabriel and Ralph Johnson, who have been working for eighteen months to create a coherent and focused program. As much as I have already written this week -- and I know that some of my articles have been quite long; sorry for getting carried away... -- I have plenty of raw material to keep me busy for a while, including the rest of the Educators Symposium, Gerald Sussman's invited talk, my favorite neologism of the week, and the event starting as I type this: Grady Booch's conference-closing talk on his ambitious project to build a handbook of software architecture. For now, I'd like to share just a few ideas from the two panels I attended in the middle part of this fine last day of OOPSLA. The Echoes panel was aimed at exploring the echoes of the structured design movement of the late 1970s. It wasn't as entertaining or as earth-shaking as it might have been given its line-up of panelists, but I took away two key points: Like Echoes, the Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots panel -- on the culture war between programmers and users -- didn't knock my socks off, but Brian Foote was in classic form. I don't think that he was cast in the role of Yoshimi, but he defended the role of the programmer qua programmer. Oh: on his way into the lecture to give his big talk, Grady Booch walked by, glanced at my iBook, and said, "Hey, another Apple guy. Cool." It's been a good day. -----