ALT.NET - Day 3

I can't believe that it has taken me so long to get around to writing my concluding thoughts on the conference.  That said, perhaps this is a good thing as I have been able to watch the post-conference churn in the blogosphere over the past couple of weeks and can incorporate some of my thoughts on that into my more general thoughts on the conference and on ALT.NET.

Also, in the spirit of being transparent, I will follow this post with a "Trip Report" post.  This will be the (verbatim) summary email that I'm sending out to my management - so if you're curious about "what is being said internally at Microsoft about the conference and ALT.NET?", there you go.

First Things First - Day 3

Session - Engaging with the Community (aka - the Simon and Howard show<g>)

Simon Guest, owner of the MS Architect Journal, and I held a session to discuss how the ALT.NET community could engage with the larger .NET community in a way that is practical, tangible, and generally more helpful than the approaches thus far (for an example of what I'm contrasting more to, see my post on day 2 of the conference).  Firstly, many thanks to Simon for being much more detail oriented than I am.  Using the dry erase board, Simon captured and related the major points expressed by the session participants.  This was the perfect complement (or supplement, depending on how you want to look at it) to my style, which is much more of an extended conversation.

Anyway, the basic point that I came into the conversation hoping to convey was (and remains) very simple.  While things like blogging and holding ALT.NET conferences are great, it's an echo chamber.  People that visit ALT.NET blogs are generally going there because they have already bought into at least some of the philosophy.  If you want to really affect change in the larger community, you need go to the community - and MSDN/MSDN Magazine are 2 fantastic ways to go about it.

All in all, I think that there was a very positive response from everybody who attended the session - and I have gotten several emails from people who have taken me up on my challenge to submit article ideas for the magazine.

Session - Language Oriented Programming

I now feel like an adult developer - I've gotten into an argument with Scott Bellware <g>.  So those of you who know me know that I'm kind of a language geek - Charles Simonyi is my hero.  As such, I was really excited to be part of a discussion on what I thought would be in that vein - and needless to say, I was disappointed when Scott seemed to only want to talk about the philosophical ramifications of doing away with parentheses for method calls in Ruby.  I remember having similar conversations wrt JavaScript about 5 years ago!

On a positive note, though, I wasn't alone in my thinking - and a side conversation on language oriented programming got started and actually continued after the meeting ended.  Several issues were discussed, but a couple interesting ones that jumped out at me were the following.

• Language oriented programming is defined along somewhat of a continuum - the continuum is measured by the definition of language and ranges from defining language as a soluble code library to defining language as a full blown DSL.  Depending on your definition, the proximity for the realization of language oriented programming shifts.
• We will probably go way too far in implementing custom "languages" before we figure out the best practices - then pragmatism will drive things back to the center (sound familiar?)
• In the case of DSL, there are 2 major challenges
  • Keeping the language scoped to a narrow domain - the biggest mistake for a DSL creator is letting it grow into another Turing-complete GPL.
  • The language integration/collaboration strategy.  I am personally REALLY interested in this one.

Closing Session

I shook everybody's hand on a piece of silly puddy!