OOPSLA
I'm at OOPSLA in Orlando. OOPSLA is one of the great conferences, and I have gone to it every year for 24 years. It was a big factor in the maturation of object-oriented programming, because it was where the people working on the revolution came to share ideas and to inspire each other. Lots of things were either invited here or were first exposed here, from patterns to UML to XP to AOP.
Of course, the revolution is over. We won. Objects have been mainstream for the past decade, and OOPSLA really hasn't been about objects for awhile. We talk about Java, Python, and C#, but the issues are really about compilers, or project management, or distributed systems. Objects are the language, but the subject of conversation is something else.
In recognition of this fact, OOPSLA is changing its name. Next year "OOPSLA" does not mean the big conference, but just the narrow technical paper sessions. The new conference will be called SPLASH, and it will be an umbrella conference with other conferences under it, including OOPSLA. Next year, PLoP will be at SPLASH. Onward! will also be part of SPLASH. Onward! is about early work in software research, too immature to go to other top conferences, but innovative and provacative. Onward! is lots of fun, and this year I expect to spend more time there than anywhere else. As is typical when you look at early ideas, half will never amount to anything. However, a few will really take off, and it is lots of fun to try to figure out which are really worthwhile.
This year Barbara Liskov is giving her Turing Award lecture at OOPSLA. I remember her first keynote at OOPSLA, which was sometime in the 80s, I think. Tom Malone is also giving a keynote. Two keynote speakers from MIT! That is what happens when the program chair is an MIT grad. :-) Seriously, who can complain about having the Turing Award lecturer as a keynote? And Tom Malone is actually from the business school, and one of the most innovative guys in applying computer science to business problems. Other keynotes are Brian Vibber from Wikipedia, Robert Johnson from Facebook, Gerard Holzmann from the Jet Propulsion Labratory, and Jeannette Wing from CMU/NSF. As usual, it is quite a nice mix of academics and people from industry, which is the hallmark of OOPSLA, and I hope will continue to be the hallmark of SPLASH.
