JAOO ‘07 (September 24, 2007)

I had a good time going to JAOO this year. JAOO is a software developers' conference held in Denmark, and I went in order to talk about Scala in the Programming Experience track.

JAOO is a lot less formal than conferences I am used to. There are no banquets, only parties. Everywhere names are listed, they are alphabetized by first name, not last. For the pre-party talk tonight, we did not hear a dry talk about the future of software processes, but instead heard about Charles Simonyi's visit to space. It is really fun.

The talks I saw were also enjoyable. Robert C. Martin preached a powerful sermon about being committed to your profession, about writing good code, about being really test-driven. Joe Armstrong talked about the concurrency-oriented programming that Erlang supports. Best of all, though, were the photos Charles Simonyi included in his morning talk on domain-specific languages. I am not sure about the argument in general, but the photographs are great:

• This is how your domain looks now.
• This is how it looks factored into data and process.
• Incremental refactoring can give illusory progress.

The last photo is priceless.