So, yesterday I was going to end up going to either the SOA and Web Service Best Practices discussion or the Creating an Informative Workspace discussion. Ultimately, I ended up sitting in the Dynamic Languages Symposium. Some of the stuff I saw in there made my head hurt. It’s just amazing what some people out there are working on. It’s really true… the thing about OOPSLA is finding that next big thing.

We saw a very interesting web development framework called HOP. What was most fascinating about this was the demonstration. He had 3 browsers open, 2 instances of Firefox and 1 instance of Konqueror. As he edited a text area in one of the Firefox instances, the text on the other 2 browsers updated automatically. HOP is implemented as a web broker, which is something I did not quite get. It seems that to get this working correctly, you ultimately end up having to run something on your desktop, which sort of defeats a main advantage of the web, which is a seamless deployment model. It will be interesting to keep an eye on this project to see how it progresses though.

Adrian and I also got a great talk from Audrey Tang about PUGS, which is an implementation of Perl 6 written in Haskell. Some of the stuff that Audrey is doing was pretty impressive. One of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while was Audrey’s IRC chat session being projected up on the screen prior to her talk. She was running OSX, and her IRC client was VIM. You read that right… VIM, and she was flipping back and forth between two channels. That brings me to another point… You will not believe how many MacBooks are floating around here… It seems like it’s at least 30%. More and more people seem to be gravitating to them. Apple might just be on to something here… :)