Some of my favorite picks from PDC 2008:
- IronRuby: the Right Language for the Right job – I didn’t realize how well developed the DLR and dynamic languages on the CLR really were. And on that…
- Deep Dive: Dynamic Languages in Microsoft .Net – it’s a dynamic language infrastructure that, out of the box, looks like it’s going to have C#, Python, Ruby, COM IDispatch, and looks to be easy to extend in existing .Net languages. I’ve been critical of many portions of the CLR, but I have to admit that it has proved successful at bringing languages together.
- "Oslo: building textual DSLs" – The rest of Oslo, not really in my interest areas, but the parser generator is certainly fun. It still confounds me that modern languages and runtimes come with so many features, but most are missing good general purpose parser libraries. Boost.Spirit for C++ is a notable exception.
- Parallel Programming for C++ Developers… – C++ is needing a facelift in the world of concurrent software. C++0x is providing basic cross-platform concurrency primitives, and Microsoft VC++ looks to be providing easier to work with high-level libraries, as well as the PDC announced support for interoperating with Intel Threading Blocks, with extensions support available for your existing home-grown concurrency libraries. This should be interesting.
There’s a whole treasure trove of PDC talks available up on channel 9, check it out.