Ok, so after 3 days of agile training followed by two full days of Clojure Conj, I am a bit ready for a rest. Too much coffee and convention food can make my stomach feel a tad off.
Anyway, yesterday started off ominously enough, with a Veterans Day parade shutting down a couple of streets, including the ones around the hotel, making getting to the hotel a bit difficult for those of us local who drive in each day. But I did make it in just in time to hear a very interesting (and perhaps a bit controversial) talk by Neil Ford on taking enterprise mindshare. He argued that Clojure can indeed plant itself inside enterprises, but that raises the question, should it? Should the goal be to make roads in large companies, or be a tool to compete with them (I think it was Paul Graham who said Lisp can be a startup’s secret weapon).
There were a few other interesting talks, though quite a few seemed to be on works in progress (in fairness, that can be expected from a young language). David Nolen spoke on predicate dispatch, a feature I can’t wait to make it in the language. And Daniel Gomez gave an intriguing talk on running Clojure on Android. There are still a few hurdles to cross, though the fact that Scala has made it on Android with very little overhead does give me hope. And the fact that I now have a Clojure REPL on my phone might result in me having one more thing to waste time on.
A few other notable talks included Chas Emerick’s talk on Bayesian networks and Clojure, something I am looking forward to playing with. That’s the problem with these conferences, I come up with long lists of things I want to work on. In fact you can to that list ClojureScript and Logs as data from yesterday’s talks as well.
The day finished up with Rich’s keynote. It was more of a technical talk, not a rant-style talk like his Simple talk at Strange Loop or the Hammock talk last year, but still interesting. I’ll go into it in more depth later since today’s talks are about to start.
The party was nice as well, though I wasn’t feeling well so I didn’t stay long. I still got to have some interesting talks with people (and free beer of course). Still no bagpipes though. I suppose my sneezing will have to be the loud annoying sound this year.