For those who couldn't make it to Montreal recently, here's an interesting review of the recent confluence of the Dynamics Languages Conference, the Montreal Scheme Lisp User Group Meeting, and OOPSLA. I've highlighted a few things I want to keep around in one of my mail folders.

http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/10/28/3/

Brooks highly recommends the book “Peopleware” (I have a copy but haven’t read it yet; clearly I should.)

Kathy Sierra talked about how to create passionate users; that is, how to make products that will get users excited and enthusiastic. This was completely fascinating and I took two whole pages of notes. She has given this talk before, and there is commentary on the web about it already; see:

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/cs/os2005/view/e_sess/7077

http://www.oreillynet.com/onlamp/blog/2005/08/ tutorial_review_creating_passi.html

And a blog at:

http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/

She’ll also be writing a book about it soon, to be published by O’Reilley.

Sebastian Fleisner from Hong Kong talked about Epi-Aspects: Aspect- Oriented Conscientious Software. By “conscientous” he means “self- sustaining”, continuing to work in the face of failure. This is based on a paper last year by Richard Gabriel and Ron Goldman about “Conscientious Software”. Its abstract is: “Software needs to grow up and become responsible for itself and its own future by participating in its own installation and customization, maintaining its own health, and adapting itself to new circumstances, new users, and new uses. To create such software will require us to change some of our underlying assumptions about how we write programs. A promising approach seems to be to separate software that does the work (allopoietic) from software that keeps the system alive (autopoietic).” The presentation talked about the latter part as having operations like monitor, test, repair, and kill. Their proposal has to do with using aspect-oriented programming to achieve this. What they’re talking about sounds a lot like some of what I’m currently doing in my own work on Hot Upgrade, and I intend to read both papers and see if there are any good ideas I can use.