Learned some Haskell. Interesting, but left me with a queasy feeling
about footprint and performance. I suppose it would be of value to those
for those in the fortunate position to sweep such concerns under the rug,
but I can't count myself among them.
But the best part of the day was the excellent Erlang BoF. Very similar to Haskell (presumably due to the same functional programming roots), but battle tested for 10-15 years in systems with 6-nines uptime SLAs. While it was only an hour long, Patrick Logan provided lots of intriguing info (esp the auto-update of modules in a running system, something anyone working under rigorous SLAs can appreciate). I'm still a bit foggy about using immutable variables, but by happy coincidence the new Erlang book was available at Powell's onsite store. So I've got fresh reading matter for the remainder of the summer. Too bad there wasn't a full Erlang tutorial: the Haskell presenter was interesting/entertaining, but Patrick's "learn by doing" approach worked much better for me.
Day 2 promises intrigue (the semi-stealthy Intel announcement at the morning tutorial) and enlightenment: Data Mining Open APIs appears to mesh nicely w/ my efforts RE: DBD::Amazon and some other similar drivers I've been working on (albeit at a slow simmer).
