This morning after fighting some fires with engineering vs. operations issues, my wife and I are off down the coast.  At the moment I’m sitting at Hungry Tiger Too’s a vegan restaurant/dive bar in Portland, waiting for breakfast, had an espresso next door at Three Friends Coffee Shop, and will stop by Voodoo donuts too for some travel snacks. 

I enjoyed blogging in detail from Emerging Languages, so figure while I’m out and about over the next week, I’m going to try and put some more thoughts up here.  Pending posts:

• confreaks equipment setup and conference recording
• thoughts on odz.mx – a side project
• how the revamp of confreaks web-site is going

• Matt MacLauren presented on Kodu a visual programming language designed to allow children to learn critical thinking.  The language exposes a 3d graphical user interface that allows characters to interact and respond to emotions and the environment.
• Rich Hickey presented on Clojure and a new potential feature tentatively titled Pods they are similar to transients only better.
• Mark Miller presented on why E is merging with Javascript and gave a brief history of programming on the web.  E is a secure distributed object oriented language with the intent of improving web programming.  Caja is an object capable safe subject of javascript, also the spanish word for box or vault.  Lessons learned from Caja were presented to the ECMA script committee.
• Christopher Bertels presented on Fancy.  Fancy is a dynamic, object-oriented programming language heavily inspired by Smalltalk, Ruby and Erlang. It will support dynamic code evaluation (as in Ruby & Smalltalk), concurrency via the actor-model and many more features yet to be implemented.
• Jonathan Shapiro presented on BitC.  BitC’s domain is critical system code; Saftey; Zero runtime footprint, it has a 7,o00 line microkernel that has been verified.
• Steve Folta presented on Trylon.  It appears to be a cross between Python and Smalltalk.
• Amos Wenger presented on ooc – a hybrid language experiment.
• Jonathan Edwards presented on Coherence and declarative programming, the future of programming and in order to do so started with where we are today.  We are effectively still writing assembly because the program is required to control the order that we read and write, from and too memory.

Instead of taking an afternoon break that was scheduled for 90 minutes, the camp has decided to jam in four more presentations:

• Bob Nystrom presented on Finch, the language most successful at meetings its goal at the camp.  He designed and started implement it as an exercise to show his work and get a new job.  He succeeded. 100% of goals achieved.
• Andrew Fischer presented on a live coding language called Circa.  It’s goals are immediate feedback, intuitive use, Fun, ability to maintain flow, and provide good tool support.
• Matt Youell presented on Wheeler.  Wheeler has the odd property that its fundamental abstraction is state.  Wheeler is about categories it does not have a type system.  Context drives behavior.
• Alexander Fritze presented on Stratified Javascript.  A cross-browser extension to JavaScript providing advanced concurrency abstractions. It’s implemented in JS itself; runs in unmodified IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari. Does not require any native browser support.
• Slava Petsov presented on Factor.  The implementation is fully compiled for performance, while still supporting interactive development. Factor applications are portable between all common platforms. Factor can deploy stand-alone applications on all platforms.
• Walter Bright presented on the D programming language.  It is a systems and applications programming language.  It does native code generation, static typing and an extremely fast compiler.  It is a big language, covering many paradigms including: Imperative; Metal; Object-oriented; RAII; Functional; Generic; Generative; Concurrent.
• Tom Van Cutsem from the Software Languages Lab at Vrije Universiteit Brussel presented on AmbientTalk.  AmbientTalk is a distributed language designed specifically around ad hoc networks and mobile devices.

Today’s presentations before lunch included:

• Rob Pike from Google presenting on Go and it’s history including Hoare’s paper from 1978 on CSP and the history of various concurrent languages.
• Ola Bini from Thoughtworks presenting on Ioke and Seph.  Seph is a work in process watch Ola’s blog for more information.
• Phil Mercurio presenting on Thyrd an experimental visual programming language.

Post lunch presentations:

• Allison Randal presented on the Parrot VM and the various languages that it supports and some of the effort required to bring your language to it.
• Adam Chlipala presented his language Ur/Web, Ur is a strict statically typed functional language designed for building web applications.
• Alan Eliasen presented on Frink, a practical calculating tool and programming language designed to make physical calculations simple.  One of it’s unique points is that all numbers carry their unit of measure with them.  It has a large database of information about units of measure.
• Giliad Bracha presented on Newspeak.  Newspeak is highly dynamic and reflective  – but designed to support modularity and security. It supports both object-oriented and functional programming.
• Joe Pamer from Microsoft presented on the production-ization of F#, their effort to move it from a purely research language to a first class member of the .NET language family.
• Jeremy Ashkenas presented on CoffeeScript -> it’s just Javascript, it doesn’t have ‘with’, semicolons, and many other things.  Going beyond javascript  by turning everything into expressions, adding automatically scoped variables, and more.
• Charles Nutter from Engine Yard presented on Mirah.  Effectively a typed version of ruby that generates Java byte-code or Java source with the associated performance.
• Steve Dekorte presented on Io.  Io is a prototype-based programming language inspired by Smalltalk (all values are objects, all messages are dynamic), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), LISP (code is a runtime inspectable/modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).

↑ Grab this Headline Animator