ACCU 2009 - after the math

[This blog has moved and this article can now be found at http://www.levelofindirection.com/journal/2009/9/24/accu-2009-conference.html. It still appears here for archival purposes]


It's 23:57. That can only mean it's time to blog about the ACCU conference again!

First I'd like to say that the #accu_conf hashtag for the conference was a great success, yielding 11 pages of tweets at the current count. I strongly believe that twitter is becoming more important every day, and that it's power to change the way we look at communication has yet to be fully assessed.

As for the conference programme itself - I can reaffirm my statement that this is the premiere developer's conference in the world! What really sets it apart is that the content is almost exclusively about programming, rather than about specific tools and libraries, and the delegates genuinely do subscribe to the "professionalism in programming" ethic of the ACCU.

To give you a flavour, here's a tweet from "Uncle Bob" (Robert Martin - of Agile Alliance and Object Mentor fame): "This is probably the geekiest conference I've been to. Lots of coding, lots of interesting discussions. Wow.". And later, "And now for the long trek home. I wish I could stay, this is a really fun conference."

Sadly, for a combination of reasons, I missed about half the sessions this year - but what I did see were at least as high quality as I have come to expect.

It was especially revealing hearing about the threading support being added to C++0x (already starting to be referred to as C++1x) - then shortly after hearing about the concurrency support being added to D 2.
In the former case the focus was on catching up in terms of the memory model and library primitives. Welcome additions to be sure. However D continues to move forward in ways that only a language not constrained by it's own legacy can do. It's contributions this year expanded on last year's functional support with transitive immutable and const modifiers, to add keywords that mark variables as shared - thus making explicit the communication paths that have been the bane of just about every imperative language before by their implicitness.

D's concurrency was presented to us by Walter Bright (who first designed the language). However, I found it amusing how Andrei Alexandrescu, in both his presentations, appeared to be talking about C++, but held D up as being the true answer to just about every tricky point he raised. More subtle than Russell Winder's continuing "C++ serves no useful purpose" theme, to be sure, but no less damning!

As usual, half of the real content of the conference took place after hours in the hotel bar (or restaurants in Oxford). John Lakos' absence from this ritual was, therefore, all the more noticeable. He arrived on friday, apparently jet-lagged, and had to rush through his 400-odd slides at such a rapidly increasing rate that it appeared his head would explode before he finished it! I can report that his head did survive to see another day, but it wasn't seen in the bar.

Perhaps he felt he wasn't required to put a new puzzle out this year, as there was a cryptography contest going on already in aid of raising funds for Bletchley Park Museum.

In all the message is clear. If you weren't at the conference you missed out on something rather special. Make every preparation now to be there next year.