OOPSLA has several different venues including demonstrations, tutorials, practitioner reports, panels, and research papers to name a few.
I attended two tutorials, one of which was entitled Making the Most of Eclipse. The presenters of this tutorial stressed that Eclipse is a rich-client platform application or a universal tools platform rather than just an IDE. Some interesting things I learned were the use of local history and scrapbook pages. Local history is like your own personal versioning system. It allows you to easily go back to a previous version of your code even if you haven’t checked it in yet to your formal versioning system. Scrapbook pages allow you to enter and execute lines of java code without creating a class and method. This is a good way to quickly test a piece of code. The other tutorial I attended was entitled Software Architecture: Principles, Strategies, Qualities. This tutorial discussed the guiding principles when designing and understanding software architecture and recommended several books on the topic for more in-depth study.
The essay on the paradoxical success of aspect oriented programming was very interesting as was the panel discussion that followed. Essays present a personal view or a particular person’s narrative of their experience.
The keynote speakers were all very interesting and well spoken. Guy Steele spoke about the Fortress programming language and how programming languages must grow over time. Fortress aspires to do for Fortran what Java did for C. I particularly enjoyed Martin Rinard’s presentation on Minimizing Understanding in the Construction and Maintenance of Software Systems. He is a very witty and engaging speaker.
I attended many other sessions and they were all very interesting and well presented. |