Oct 31 2009
Oopsla+Onward+WikiSym 2009
Oopsla 2009 and WikiSym 2009 were held in Orlando this year, and not just Orlando but Disney World: a strange island of space and time right down to the Mickey Mouse shaped swimming pool. I find Oopsla itself hard to keep up with: too many interesting workshops, panels, technical talks; and with WikiSym too I was overwhelmed and didn’t see as much as I would have liked. Moreover, this marked the year that Oopsla was more formally distinguished from Onward 2009, the conference on the new and the strange in software, so they are full sibling conferences. For me the highlights were the Onward “Plateau” workshop on the HCI of programming languages, the Onward talk by Jenny Quillien, Pam Rostal, Dave West on Christopher Alexander’s work, and the WikiSym closing keynote by Brion Vibber of the Wikimedia Foundation. I also had a great time at my tutorial on human aspects of software development practice based on our hacked version of the board game Monopoly. New year Oopsla and Onward are both under the new “Splash” umbrella at Reno, and WikiSym is co-located with WikiMania in Gdansk. Robert Biddle