Post-ECOOP

I returned from ECOOP a few weeks ago, and have been trying to figure out what I got of the experience. I’ll focus on two big things.

For a long time I have been debating what I should do after I graduate, which I usually phrase as “industry vs academia”. I’m coming to understand this is a false dichotomy, as most dichotomies are. (It helps that a friend spelled it out for me.) Dave Herman’s talk, on starting and running a research lab doing academic-style work (e.g., developing a principled, safe programming language) in industry, helped me see that. Shriram’s summer school lectures were equally helpful, and sort of the dual of this: taking objects from industry—scripting languages—and applying academic rigor to them. ECOOP, more than any other conference I’ve been to, brought together industry and academia in a smooth spectrum. I wish I had attended as a younger student.

The other big thing was a crystallized version of thoughts I had on programming language. Matthias Felleisen on Racket and Larry Wall on Perl 6 helped me see this: anything you might want to do to or in a program should be expressible in your programming language (Matthias said it better). This is what annoys me about languages like C, Java, and Coq. C has the preprocessor and make and the dynamic linker, etc. Java has Eclipse. Coq has OCaml plugins. All of these languages require doing “more” than writing programs, but have no way to express it in the language. Racket (and, apparently, Perl 6) pulls those things into the language so that those too become just writing programs: extend the reader, dynamically load a library, muck about with the top level, add new syntax.

I got a handful of smaller things: insights about what objects are best at, what a long-term (~25 year) research agenda looks like, an appreciation for the 99 different designs for any given program.

ECOOP was a great experience. If I go again, though, I hope the summer school won’t conflict with the entire research track.