The organizers of TSSJS 2009 have asked me to serve as the Languages track chair,
and as long-time readers of this blog will already have guessed, I've accepted quite
happily. This means that if you're interested in presenting at TSSJS on a language-on-the-JVM,
you now know where to send the bottle of Macallan 18. ;-)

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So the first thing I do when I get back from PDC? After taking my youngest trick-or-treating
at the Redmond Town Center, and settling down into the weekend, I pull out the PDC
hard drive and have a look around.

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PDC 2008 in LA is over now, and like most PDCs, it definitely didn't disappoint on
the technical front--Microsoft tossed out a whole slew of new technologies, ideas,
releases, and prototypes, all with the eye towards getting bits (in this case, a Western
Digital 160 GB USB hard drive) out to the developer community and getting back feedback,
either through the usual channels or, more recently, the blogosphere.

These are the things I think I think about this past PDC:

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One of the more interesting logistical problems faced by the people who run the Microsoft
Conference Center is that several events are often running in parallel, and each has
their own catering provisions--one might get snacks, another may have lunch boxes,
and others have full buffet, and so on. Of course, each group will want to make sure
their food isn't swiped by people at other events with less-appealing food, so staff
members at the Conference Center (literally) stand guard over the snack tables, looking
for badges and directing them to the appropriate table as necessary.

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The full list is here.
It's a pretty prestigious group--and I'm totally floored that I'm there next to some
pretty big names.

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As
Joel points out, we've made a draft of the SSCLI 2.0 Internals book available
for download (via his blog). Rather than tell you all about the book, which Joel summarizes
quite well, instead I thought I'd tell you about the process by which the book came
to be.

Editor's note: if you have no interest in the process by which a book can get
done, skip the rest of this blog entry.

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For those of you who were at the Cinncinnati NFJS show, please continue on to the
next blog entry in your reader--you've already heard this. For those of you who weren't,
then allow me to make the announcement:

Hi. My name's Ted Neward, and I am now a ThoughtWorker.

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Another DZone newsletter crosses my Inbox, and again I feel compelled to comment.
Not so much in the uber-aggressive style of my previous attempt, since I find myself
more on the fence on this one, but because I think it's a worthwhile debate and worth
calling out.

The article in question is "5 Reasons Why You Don't Want A Jack-of-all-Trades Developer",
by Rebecca Murphey. In it, she talks about the all-too-common want-ad description
that appears on job sites and mailing lists:

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This comment deserves response:

First of all, if you're quoting my post, blocking out my name, and attacking me behind
my back by calling me "our intrepid troll", you could have shown the decency of linking
back to my original post. Here it is, for those interested in the real discussion:

http://www.agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/jurgenappelo/professionalism-knowledge-first

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Recently this little gem crossed my Inbox....

Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last


By J----- A-----

Do you trust a doctor with diagnosing your mental problems if the doctor tells you
he's got 20 years of experience? Do you still trust that doctor when he picks up his
tools, and asks you to prepare for a lobotomy?

Would you still be impressed if the doctor had 20 years of experience in carrying
out lobotomies?

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If you've peeked at my blog site in the last twenty minutes or so, you've probably
noticed some churn in the template in the upper-left corner; by now, it's been finalized,
and it reads "JOB REFERRALS".

WTHeck? Has Ted finally sold out? Sort of, not really. At least, I don't
think so.

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After the previous post, I just had to look. The implementation of Object.equals is,
as was previously noted, just "return this == obj", but the implementation of Object.hashCode
is far more complicated.

Taken straight from the latest hg-pulled OpenJDK sources, Object.hashCode is a native
method registered from Object.c that calls into a Hotspot-exported function, JVM_IHashCode(),
from hotspot\src\share\vm\prims\jvm.cpp:

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I'm not sure what it is about our industry that promotes the flame war, but for some
reason exchanges like this
one, unheard of in any other industry I've ever touched (even tangentially), are
far too common, too easy to get into, and entirely too counterproductive.

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The Pragmatic Programmer says, "Learn a new language every year". This is great advice,
not just because it puts new tools into your mental toolbox that you can pull out
on various occasions to get a job done, but also because it opens your mind to new
ideas and new concepts that will filter their way into your code even without explicit
language support.

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I recently had the pleasure of meeting Bruce Wilson, a principal with iLink, and we
had a pleasant conversation about enterprise applications and trends and such. Last
week, in the middle of my trip to Prague and Zurich,
he sent me a link to a blog entry he'd written on using
Office as a front-end, and it sort of underscored some ideas I've had around Office
in general.

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