[gambit-list] OOPSLA 2007 « Dan Weinreb’s Weblog

Bradley Lucier lucier at math.purdue.edu
Mon Nov 12 09:15:32 EST 2007


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.



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