By the way, if anybody wants to argue about languages next week...

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... or if you're a-hankering to kick my *ss over my sacreligious statements about
Perl, I'll be at Building 20 on the Microsoft campus in Redmond, at the Language.NET
Symposium with a few other guys who know something about language and VM implementation:
Jim Hugunin, Gilad Bracha, Wayne Kelly, Charlie Nutter, John Rose, John Lam, Erik
Meijer, Anders Hejlsberg....

I wish there were more "other VMs" representation showing up (some of the Parrot or
Strongtalk or Squeak folks would offer up some great discussion points), but in the
event they don't, it'll still be an interesting discussion. Some of the topics I'm
looking forward to:

"Targeting DLR" (Martin Maly)

"Multiple Languages on the Java VM" (John Rose and Charles Nutter)

"Vision of the DLR" (Jim Hugunin)

"Retargeting DLR" (Seo Sanghyeon)

"Ruby" (John Lam)

"Ruby.NET" (Wayne Kelly)

"Integrating Languages into the VSS" (Aaron Marten) [I presume VSS means Visual
Studio Shell and not Visual Source Safe...]

"JScript" (Pratap Lakshman) [He can't be looking forward to this, based on what
I'm hearing about the debates around ECMAScript 4.0....]

"Volta" (Erik Meijer)

"Parsing Expression Grammars in F#" (Harry Pierson) [I can't be certain, but I
think I turned Harry on to F# in the first place, so I'm curious to learn what he's
doing with it in Real Life]

And for those of you living within easy driving distance of Redmond, take a trip out
to DigiPen this Saturday and Sunday for the Seattle
Code Camp. I'll be doing a talk on F# and another one on Scala on Saturday (modulo
any scheduling changes). Those
of you already coming should check out the xUnit.NET presentation (currently scheduled
for 4:45PM on Saturday)--some of James' and Brad's ideas of what a unit-testing framework
should really look like are kinda radical, very intriguing, and guaranteed
to be thought-provoking. Dunno if there's an xUnit.JVM yet...

... but there should be.

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