TITLE: Strange Loop 1: Day One
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: September 29, 2018 6:19 PM
DESC:
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BODY:
Last Wednesday morning, I hopped in my car and headed south to
Strange Loop 2018.
It had been a few years since I'd listened to Zen and the
Art of Motorcycle Maintenance on a conference drive, so
I popped it into the tapedeck (!) once I got out of town and
fell into the story. My top-level goal while listening to
Zen was similar to my top-level goal for attending
Strange Loop this year: to experience it at a high level;
not to get bogged down in so many details that I lost sight
of the bigger messages. Even so, though, a few quotes stuck
in my mind from the drive down. The first is an old friend,
one of my favorite lines from all of literature:
Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind.
The other was the intellectual breakthrough that unified
Phaedrus's philosophy:
Quality is not an object; it is an event.
This idea has been on my mind in recent months. It seemed
a fitting theme, too, for Strange Loop.
On the first day of the conference, I saw mostly a mixture of
compiler talks and art talks, including:
•
@mraleph's
"Six Years of Dart", in which he reminisced on the evolution
of the language, its ecosystem, and its JIT. I took at least
one cool idea from this talk. When he compared the performance
of two JITs, he gave a histogram comparing their relative
performances, rather than an average improvement. A new system
often does better on some programs and worse on others. An
average not only loses information; it may mislead.
•
Jason Dagit's "Your Secrets are Safe with Julia", about a system
that explores the use of
homomorphic encryption
to to compile secure programs. In this context, the key element
of security is privacy. As Dagit pointed out, "trust is not
transitive", which is especially important when it comes to
sharing a person's health data.
•
I just loved
Hannah Davis's
talk on "Generating Music From Emotion". She taught me about
data sonification
and its various forms. She also demonstrated some of her
attempts to tease multiple dimensions of human emotion out of
large datasets and to use these dimensions to generate music
that reflects the data's meaning. Very cool stuff. She also
showed the short video
Dragon Baby,
which made me laugh out loud.
•
I also really enjoyed "Hackett: A Metaprogrammable Haskell",
by
Alexis King.
I've read about this project on the Racket mailing list for a
few years and have long admired King's ability in posts there
to present complex ideas clearly and logically. This talk did
a great job of explaining that Haskell deserves a powerful macro
system like Racket's, that Racket's macro system deserves a
powerful type system like Haskell's, and that integrating the
two is more challenging than simply adding a stage to the
compiler pipeline.
I saw two other talks the first day:
- the opening keynote address by Simon Peyton Jones,
"Shaping Our Children's Education in Computing" [
link
]
-
David Schmüdde,
"Misuser" [
link
]
My thoughts on these talks are more extensive and warrant short
entries of their own, to follow.
I had almost forgotten how many different kinds of cool ideas
I can encounter in a single day at Strange Loop. Thursday was
a perfect reminder.
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