Unformed thoughts from SPA'05

Turtle

I've just returned from the SPA'05 conference where Steve Freeman and I gave a presentation on Embedded Domain Specific Languages in Java. The best aspect of the conference is the mind-stretching conversation that occurs over coffee, dinner, beer and scotch until late at night early in the morning. Here are a few of the thoughts, questions and wierd facts that emerged over the four days:

* Intentional programming and intentional computing look like being important new ways of thinking about computers. But what does "intent" really mean?

* Could Stockholm Syndrome help us manage user expectations?

* Software should be turtles all the way down.

* Semiotics. How can we use it to think about software? And what is it anyway?

* How much syntax do we really need? Or... how little syntax can we get away with? We need a syntax liberation front. Rise up! You have nothing to lose but your tool chains.

* If a round-trip modelling tool can generate runnable code from a model and a model from runnable code, is it even a model any more? Isn't it just another representation of the code? So why call it a model?

* Pigs can lie.

* Creating vapourware is much harder than I expected.

* Why on earth didn't I learn to program in OCaml before?

Copyright © 2005 Nat Pryce. Posted 2005-04-14. Share it.