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50 in 50 – It’s a bigger world than you think?
By admin | October 1, 2008
Keynotes are usually about somewhat tangible things – new programming languages, tools, process practices, and so on. Not quite so with today’s keynote by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel.
I went to Gabriels talk on Tuesday, and that was pretty different, too, so it’s no big surprise that the keynote continued in the somewhat stylistic form with prerecorded speech and music. And a feeling of having seen something important and relevant without exactly being able to pin it down.
The keynote was basically a run-through of different languages, mostly the old ones – COBOL, Lisp, Algol 60. According to the introduction, 50 languages should have been mentioned. I didn’t keep count, but it seems likely. This was the introduction:
{Prologue(50)
“Fifty in fifty”. Simply a quirk?
Fifty topics or languages?
Fifty years of language work
In fifty minutes? Clever guess,
Yet subtler considerations lurk.
To clarify one reason why:
Adter we’ve finished this evening’s speech,
Dirk will have made – and so will I -
Fifty remarks of exactly fifty words each.
} /switch/
Although they couldn’t keep the 50 minutes, the rest of the keynote was excellently performed – not an easy feat when the form is like that. Judging by the ovation afterwards, most of the audience was captured by the talk, too.
October 1st, 2008 at 5:53 pm
I really must look up the lyrics of that song about god programming in Lisp.
I loved the presentation, it was a very refreshing way of presenting something that might have turned out very boring in the wrong hands.
I’d love to know what a book on the history of Java would be like if written by these two. I’m guessing it would make a great read for college students (and everybody else).
October 1st, 2008 at 6:53 pm
Good presentation
fifty seasons of code
dick and guy rules
October 1st, 2008 at 8:46 pm
All I have to say is….. MORE COWBELL!
For those who didn’t get the reference (are there any left), the original SNL sketch is at http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1017105/more_cowbell/
October 1st, 2008 at 9:11 pm
I hope the slides will be available online. Can’t wait to investigate the code examples more in depth – especially the shakespearian Perl
October 1st, 2008 at 9:25 pm
Also note that the Shakespearean Perl-film was produced and directed by Alan Smithee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Smithee
As for the perl modules they used, it’s all hideously true.
http://search.cpan.org/~dconway/Lingua-Romana-Perligata-0.50/lib/Lingua/Romana/Perligata.pm
http://search.cpan.org/~gbarr/Lingua-Shakespeare-1.00/lib/Lingua/Shakespeare.pod
October 1st, 2008 at 9:35 pm
Also check out Gene Frenkle reappearing five years after his death in http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4867770019441888701
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:48 am
Thanks for the link Paul. I am one of those few who didn’t get it. Guess I might be a bit too young or something.
October 2nd, 2008 at 10:44 pm
[...] Rasmus Fruergaard in category “Most poetic” for his haiku. [...]
October 4th, 2008 at 9:54 am
This is the second time I’ve seen this presentation and I can’t wait to see it again. It’s really quite lovely.
If anyone’s interested in the Lisp-song, it’s called “God wrote in Lisp” by Julia Ecklar. That should be enough to google on.
October 6th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
Thanks Ola!