Tuesday, June 29, 2010

TOOLS Europe day 1

So, after a monstrous 16hr journey from Maribor to Malaga, I arrived at TOOLS Europe. Malaga is surprisingly nice, all the package holiday tourists stay out of town - win!

The day kicked off with Oege de Moor's invited talk. I was not that excited about the prospect, but it was actually a really interesting talk - his tool is very useful and does some interesting things, all whilst being language independent. And the internal language is a pretty cool combination of logic/relational query language and OO.

My talk was at 2:30, and went pretty well. I should probably have had more and better examples; I realised as I talked that I was expecting the audience to keep rather a lot in their heads - why is this so obvious when giving the talk, but impossible to comprehend when practising?

Erik Ernst followed with an interesting talk on virtual types/parametric types/their relationship. Lots more interesting virtual classes stuff to think about.

Johan Ostland finished off the session with a talk about Welterweight Java, the talk filled in a lot of background about the various -weight Java calculi that I wasn't aware of, but probably should have been. As nice as Welterweight Java looks, I hope to never have to use it - my languages are already too big, and the smaller the better: if I could work purely in the untyped lambda calculus I would.

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