[Smalltalk]

ACCU Conference

I am at the ACCU conference this week. Read on for my report.

For me, the conference started on Wednesday with Guido van Rossum's keynote on the future of Python ("Python 3000"). I am not a Python guy myself (bought a book on it but never got the time to read it yet), nevertheless the keynote was kind of fun - especially to hear Guido's rationale for some language features: "it's my language". He also has a cool T-shirt: "Python: programming the way Guido intended indented it to be".

The rest of the day I went to Mark Radford's talk - Exploring Interfaces - A C++ Perspective and Detlef Vollmann's Metacode presentation. Especially the latter one was quite interesting for me, although I couldn't fully enjoy it because my talk on Cross-Platform Issues With Floating-Point Arighmetic in C++ was next.

Metacode looks quite interesting and its far more readable than the template metaprogramming stuff some people are doing.

Regarding my presentation, well, despite the ugly title and the rather obscure topic, the room was packed full with 35 people. Amazing ;-)

In the evening I had dinner with Detlef Vollmann, Bernhard Merkle and Oliver Kullmann. We went to some kind of Italian restaurant, and, well, this wasn't the right place to change my reservations against English food. Have I mentioned that the conference lunch consists of sandwiches and chips - every day? On the other hand, it's amazing with how many variations on sandwiches mankind has come up.

The second day started with Helen Sharp's keynote on software development as a social activity with technical practices. Not all that interesting to me. After all, software development is all about communication, and communication is a social activity. A few weeks ago I read Why Men Don't Listen and Women Can't Read Maps and now I understand that this topic can only be researched by a women ;-) Nevertheless, nice presentation with many photos of programmers doing programming, and introducing the maverick developer (think Top Gun).

Scott Meyers talk "When C++ Hits the Hardware" was quite good - he is a great speaker - but didn't give any new knowledge to me. Scott feared seemed to fear the ACCU Conference crowd, though. This was his first presentation at the ACCU Conference, and someone told him that this conference is different from your typical programming conference in that half of the C++ standardization committee members sit in the audience. And this includes people who can cite the text from the C++ standards document. Backwards. Even when you wake them up in the middle of the night ;-)

Day three started with Herb Sutter's keynote on concurrent programming. He gave an overview of his Concur work, which extends C++ with language support for active objects. He also did some interesting work in extending the STL with parallel algorithms. While active objects aren't really the newest thing under the sun (there is also an implementation in PoCo), it nevertheless seems to be the only practical solutions to providing higher level multithreading abstractions.

Herb's presentation was followed by Scott Meyers talk on the Double-Checked Locking pattern. Highlight for me was how Scott practically deconstructed a poor guy from Trolltech (Trolltech guy: "but we have a clever solution for the DCLP issue using the volatile keyword and an extra temporary variable...", Scott: "listen carefully...")

Scott Meyers also gave a second talk ("The Keyhole Problem") focusing on various annoyances like combo boxes that are too small (by one line), non-resizable dialogs, unnecessary length restrictions, and so on. Both enlightening and entertaining.

The Speaker's Dinner was fun. Kind of a speed dating experience. Speakers had their fixed seat and non-speaker had to change tables after every dish. Good for meeting interesting people. And the food was good, too.

The last day's keynote was given by Hubert Matthews and he talked about concurrency from a requirement point of view. Very interesting and excellent presentation.

Schalk Cronje's talk on multi-language generative programming was surprisingly easy to grasp given the fact that it included some metaprogramming stuff. The first time I saw XML combined with XSLT generating template metaprogramming C++. Mind-boggling. Lunch brought surprising new variations on the sandwitch theme. England never ceases to amaze me... As the last talk of the conference, Kevlin Henney's talk on STL patterns was certainly another highlight.

Now I'm in a hotel at Stansted airport (after a 3+ hour bus drive) and I am already missing the conference atmosphere. I'm certainly looking forward to next year.

Posted by guenter at April 21, 2006 10:09 AM