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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Final Thoughts
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Yes I will be at Smalltalk Solutions in Toronto. Through various means, people have let me know that the more recent versions of TeaTime do indeed use a message construct that looks something like what I had hoped to see. Cool. Anyway, some final OOPSLA thoughts.
I've attended OOPSLA since 1994 (it will be fun to return full circle next year to Portland) with a couple misses here and there. It's interesting to reflect back along time, what the general atmosphere of the conference was, what was "hot" from year to year. In the beginning, the OO thing was in the early adopter field (as far as general industry went). The camps were the C++ and Smalltalk camps. Honorary mention for Objective-C, CLOS, and some weird thing called Self. And Beta.
Somewhere in there, Java pounded ashore. And the conference seemed to stagnate. This is not a statement for or against Java at all. It's really more of a noting that at some point the industry decided to create a mass produced mass appeal notion of OO. One might even argue that industry was simply injecting some pragmatic reasoning into what had hitherto been a bunch of frothing visionaries. It wasn't so much a good or bad thing as it was an inevitable thing. For better or worse though, it is that non-mainstream stuff that makes a conference interesting. At least for me. If a computing conference doesn't do something for the general creative efforts of its attendees, what's the point?
I noted in Seattle (2002) that the conference might be returning to its roots (whatever that means). Leaving San Diego on Thursday, I found myself thinking "yeah, it is." It's not that there was some mass resurgance of my favorite (to date) programming language; it was that that didn't matter so much. The conference had a much decreased sense of "mob mentality." Gone were the "what are you doing?" to find out if you were at all in the mainstream. Or the need to be an XP evangelist to be anybody. Feeling shunned as Smalltalker, or a Javaite, or whatever. The amount of silver bullets being passed out was way down. The prophets declaring they had found the one and only programming way were quelled. There were more programming lanugages and methodologies than ever to sample creative solutions from.
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