Oct 24 2008
OOPSLA 2008
Back from Nashville and OOPSLA: the ACM conference on Object Oriented Programming. Systems, Languages, and Applications. OO may now be main stream, but OOPSLA has made a practice of looking at the new and exciting, and has a focus on the human aspects that is typically missing from most Computer Science and Software Engineering conferences. Highlights this year for me were the talks by Lucy Suchman on situated cognition, and by Mark Lehner on organizational work structures in the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza; but especially Richard Gabriel’s essay talk “Designed as Designer”. And my friends Daev Clarke, James Noble and John Potter won the award for the most influential paper from 10 years earlier! Nashville was fun too: from the Parthenon to the Country Music bars. After all this time, OOPSLA is still worth attending, and I plan to be there in Orlando in 2009. — Robert Biddle