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St. Louis, MO, Oct 22—The Strange Loop conference is a new tech conference organized by Alex Miller. It started today at the Tivoli Theater in Delmar Loop in University City, MO. Three hundred people attended the conference.

It's a rainy day here at St. Louis, as you can see in this picture that I took in the morning. (Click on it to see the full-sized version where you can see the marquise featuring The Strange Loop starring Bob Lee and Alex Payne more clearly.)

Since the whole conference is being video taped and will be made available on InfoQ, I won't bore you with too much details. What follows are my impressions of the conference.

Today's program includes three tracks of one-hour talks running at 11:40am, 12:50pm, 2:10pm, and a keynote at 3:20pm. Followed by a party at Blueberry Hill that also included four fifteen-minute Strange Passion talks.

The first session I went to is Mario Aquino's Zen Mind, Worrier Spirit talk, in which Mario compared agile development process with the way the military trains, lives and operates. Mario is a fan of Zen philosophy and used several koans including the where master kept filling the tea cup for his guest, even after the cup is full. It's an entertaining talk. Since this talk involved eastern philosophies, I asked an eastern philosophical question during the Q&A: Do you think agile is a methodology the the ages? Or will it go out of style in five or ten years just like waterfall is out of style now? Mario gave a long answer that I'll have to wait till the videos come out to study further.

The second session I went to is Dean Wampler's Polyglot and Polyparadigm Programming for Better Agility talk. Dean is a very articulate speaker and presented his argument in a thoughtful and balanced fashion. He talked about several application architectural approaches, including aspects-oriented programming, functional approaches, and DSLs. The one thing that impressed me is Dean's first example architecture—that of Emacs, where "Components + Scripting = Application." The theater is full. Twittable quotes include "I can't believe Eclipse doesn't have a scripting infrastructure when it was first designed." and "I think every programmer should learn Clojure, for its principled design."

The third session I went to is Charlie Nutter's Ruby Mutants talk. The topic is not JRuby, but a couple of other languages THAT'S NOT RUBY—Duby and Surinx. Both are Ruby look-alikes, one statically-types with local type inference and the other dynamically typed. These languages are Charlie's sand boxes where languages features experiments are conducted. Duby allows Charlie to write (almost-)Ruby code that can be compiled to Java classes or Java source files. The Duby classes can then be run on the JVM without any extra Duby-specific runtime library with Java-like performance. During the demo on stage, Duby outperformed JRuby by two orders of magnitude. Twittable quotes include "The JVM is so pervasive that the chances of it not being kept up-to-date for future hardware advances is minimal.", "The JVM is the people's runtime." and "Static typing is not needed until it is really needed."

The keynote address today is given by Bob Lee on the topic of The Future of Java, in which he explained the new Java language features for Java 7 that are being worked on in Project Coin, new sorting routines, the G1 garbage collector, and JSR 330. He showed code examples of ARM blocks. He went through the his own fixing vararg error messages proposal. And he finally showed off the interface and annotations for dependency injection from the freshly approved (just last week) JSR 330. He also revealed his thoughts on the next logical step for JSR 330, standardizing the configuration scripts.

I went to the π for dinner with Denis, Nathan and other OCI people, and went back to the Duck Room at Blueberry Hill for the happy hour and Strange Passions talks. I get to meet Bob Lee in person after many years.

There were four Strange Passions talks: Kevin Archer talked about neurons and how they work. Jeff Schmitz talked about astronomy and quasars. Alex Miller talked about psychology and the famous marshmallow experiment in which cruel college professors gave four-year-olds a marshmallow and tell them that if they can refrain from eating it until they come back they can get another one. And finally Ken Sipe talked about options trading: all about deltas, thetas, vegas, and some other attributes. These are all run facts to know.

Well, that's the first day of the Strange Loop conference. A success by any measurement. Sadly, I don't think many people will blog about the conference as used to be. They tweeted the conference all day long and are probably in bed now, getting ready for tomorrows sessions which starts at 8:00am. I think it's bed time for me too.

And oh, have I mentioned that Charlie Nutter emphasized that Duby IS NOT RUBY and will not run Rails.