EUC 2009
The Erlang User Conference in Stockholm was a lot of fun! Thank you everybody at Erlang Training and Consulting for the excellent organisation.
My favourite talk of the day was Patrik Nyblom on the development of SMP support in the BEAM virtual machine. He was entertaining andalso inspiring: that is some really hot technology that our programs are sitting on. I'm reminded of Klacke's talk in London last year: Erlang programmers do have a more powerful tool than everybody else and now is the time to make the most of it.
Kostis Sagonas's presentation of the latest Dialyzer developments was great too. I'm one of those opinionated bastards who doesn't care much about standardized programming styles and this tends to put me at odds with people writing linting tools. This time I had no room to complain: the tool is entirely optional, the motivating examples of bugs it can find were very easy to relate to, and it's been developed and maintained as a production tool for many years now. Great marketing!
Some of the other talks really lacked motivating examples for me. I'm sure it's fun to write cloud-hosted databases and map-reduce frameworks, but what problem does it solve for me? The SQL people have long since fallen into the trap of "if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." NoSQL might be the same.
I dined a bit too well with friends on the nights leading up to the conference and so I missed the first talks about Nitrogen and advanced parse-transform hackery, which is a pity because I heard they were some of the best.
The whole week in Stockholm has been a really great time. I'm writing this on my short flight back to Switzerland at the moment and feeling very glad to live in the neighbourhood again. Now back to Erlang hacking..