JAOO - Day 3
I started day 3 with no great expectations at all (maybe because I was still a little sleepy from yesterday’s party).
It was supposed to start with Guy Steele on “The Soul of a New Programming Language”. I had heard of this Guy, so I thought it would be a good talk.
After the talk I had only one word left for it: WOW!. The talk was about Fortress, a brand new language Sun is designing especially for scientific purposes. It’s supposed to be “the new Fortran” with really phantastic features: a language that supports mathematical notations, contracts (against which the implementation is automatically unit-tested), operator overloading (he made a good point why it was going to be better than C++ operator overloading), transactional distributed memory, built-in notion about other nodes in the computation cluster (so loops are automagically distributed to multiple nodes) and much, much more. After this talk I needed a long break to let this all settle down … WOW!
Then I saw the end of Eberhard Wolff’s introductory talk to the Enterprise Performance track, one guy from Tangosol and one from BEA talking about performant Java persistence (unfortunately I already knew their slides from somewhere on the web) and then Kirk Pepperdine on Performance Anti-Patterns. Angelika Langer’s talk on Micro-Benchmarking in Java revealed some interesting details of the JVM and the Hotspot compiler (she still only got a green-minus from me). And Andre Bondi talked about Performance Engineering on a project of his (how to measure performance, how to interpret the results and how to tackle problems).
After the conference, and after waiting for the bus for ’bout an hour (there was some demonstration going on, so maybe this was the reason), I decided I needed something to eat. Denmark? The sea? Fresh fish? Sushi! So I went to a super market and bought what turned out to be one big roll of rice, filled(?) with this algae stuff (not the kind Alistair Cockburn was talking about yesterday) and with some pieces of raw fish on top. There was also Wasabi (the hot green stuff) and soy sauce, so everything that’s necessary - except chopsticks. But that wasn’t too bad, now that we are in the age of fingerfood.
What’s still bugging me is Guy Steele’s talk. So many new (and old) ideas for a new programming language (and he said that they had already taken out the really crazy ones), so I still have some research to do today. More tomorrow … WOW!