After today's keynote session, I met up with Simon Peyton-Jones and Bryan O'Sullivan. A vibrant discussion with these two Haskellers. We had all noticed that Haskell, and FP languages in general, have been doing really well lately and mused about why. Perhaps it's that people are becoming more used to functional approaches to problem solving because popular languages include some of them these days. Or perhaps it's that FP already has tools to solve problems that are suddenly hot, such as parallelization.
In any case, Simon's Haskell talks have really been highlights this week for many.
I had some time to visit the show floor. Stopped by the Debian booth and met Steve Langasek. A couple of Sun guys dropped by to talk about trademarks with OpenJDK. Bart Massey of Portland State Univ. also dropped by. I've conversed with him in email a few times. We talked about what PSU is doing with Haskell, some of the code I've written, and some of the code they've written. They're doing some fun stuff with rocketry and software-defined radio.
Oh, attended Simon's talk on nested data parallelism, which he is working to add to GHC. That sounds like a very interesting topic. Think list comprehensions, but the compiler automatically parallelizes the task for you.
After the conference's events, went out to dinner with some local (and some conference) Haskellers. That was a lot of fun, and Terah and Jacob got to come along too. People are doing some interesting stuff with Haskell.
Nat Torkington, program chair, started off the day. He commented that one of the most interesting trends these days is the expansion of the Open Source ideals beyond software.
Tim O'Reilly commented about the FSF's four freedoms, and asked how we maintain them. We have to think about preserving freedoms -- questions such as Free Software that relies on proprietary services, data, or business processes. It's important to remember to pay attention to freedom and not just to the success of businesses. But businesses matter and have enormous power and will always be related.
Tim really pushed expanding the boundaries of Open Source and thinking ahead: wikipedia, OpenID, etc. He also asked: does Congress need a version control system?
He suggested there are four open source success factors: frictionless software distribution, collaborative development, freedom to build/adapt/extend, freedom to fork.
Hadoop is an interesting FLOSS project to build some infrastructure like Google has. Apparently Yahoo is very interested.
Back to Nat... hardware is cheap and everyone keeps buying more of it.
James Reinders from Intel talking about multi-core parallelism. Saying that parallelism is going to be more and more important. Intel released threading building blocks, a series of templates for C++, as GPL'd software at the conference this week. I'm not all that excited about a C++ project, though, since I think languages like Haskell have more promise here anyway.
The other Intel guy mentioned Intel's open source involvement: intellinuxgraphics.org, intellinuxwireless.org, linuxpowertop.org, kernel,org, moblin.org. Linux laptops have the longest runtimes compared to other laptops.
"It's amazing how many people you can make paranoid by showing up with a tie and a suit to do a keynote at OSCON." -- James Reinders
Simon Peyton-Jones is up now, and Nat says he will "stretch your brain until only tiny bits are left."
State of the art in parallelism is really 30 years old with locks and condition variables -- like building a skyscraper out of bananas.
Locks are difficult to do right and have "diabolical error recovery".
Let's do transactions against memory instead of against a database. Implementation can even be similar to databases. The idea is transactional memory, and it sounds very, very slick.
Mark Shuttleworth and Tim for an interview...
Mark was fine, but I wish Tim had more interesting questions for him.
I went up to the front a few minutes after the event to talk to Simon PJ. He was talking to someone, who saw my nametag, and said, "Hi John, nice to meet you." He looked familiar but I couldn't quite place him, so I asked who he was. "Mark Shuttleworth." Yep, I was sitting just far enough back from the stage that I wasn't behind one of the large TV screens and couldn't make out faces real well, and I didn't recognize him. Erg..
Comments
Thu, 21.08.2008 11:28
Only problem with them deletin g all info about me is that th ey might re-collect my info fr om some place later and [...]
Thu, 21.08.2008 11:19
Civil law might be preferable in this case. Will you be abl e to get a prosecutor to care about a minor offense? [...]
Thu, 21.08.2008 02:56
I don't know about the situati on in the U.S., but here in Ge rmany, we have nice privacy la ws: [*]First, any c [...]
Thu, 21.08.2008 02:22
He could recycle it, but first ly, it's much more efficient i n the long term for it not to be sent in the first pla [...]
Thu, 21.08.2008 00:48
Nice one! You've inspired me to do something about these an noying PennySaver catalogues - like you, I hate junk m [...]
Wed, 20.08.2008 22:00
"I will never understand why p eople like yourself like to ma ke mountains out of (making mo untains out of)^n mole h [...]
Wed, 20.08.2008 21:54
I'm not subverting the law; th is usage of it has been explic itly approved and encouraged b y the Supreme Court, and [...]
Wed, 20.08.2008 20:47
How proud you must be, subvert ing an obscure law for your ow n, unrelated ends. I can only guess you're one to ran [...]