Eh, I should have written this yesterday. I'm gettin' lazy.
While I'm not quite certain how Damian managed to make code formatting interesting, he did. He also confessed that he's disciplining himself to write code to the standards he proposes in his book. I suspect there are a few people who will appreciate that.
The keynotes, as usual, were interesting. Paul Graham managed to be somewhat less offensive than last year. Of course, I certainly wasn't offended by his comments last year (he pretty much took a buzzsaw to Java programmers), but this year he took the buzzsaw to the business types. It was interesting stuff. My favorite quote explained how businesses were going to learn lessons from the open source community.
When I say business can learn from open source, I don't mean any specific business can. I mean business can learn about new conditions the same way a gene pool does. I'm not claiming companies can get smarter, just that dumb ones will die.
That was the crux of the talk. As far as I'm concerned, many companies today are fighting to maintain the status quo and refuse to acknowledge that they can't stop evolution (RIAA anyone?).
I've also gotten a huge amount done on AI::Prolog. I should have a new version up soon. The nicest feature is how the output of logical terms now have named variables and are formatted nicely to look pretty close to what SWI-Prolog would dump.
