Okay so this post maybe happening a little later than Friday but in my defence there were some excellent conversations to go with the after-conference drinks.
Day 2 featured two talks by Rich Hickey, I had already seen some of the Datomic stuff from QCon and the web so I found the stuff on the new reducers library more engaging. I have never thought of map having an implicit ordering promise.
Meikel Brandmeyer gave a historical review of lazy seq which was really helpful for understanding laziness (something I have a bit of a problem with). One of the real highlights though was Chris Ford’s talk about canon music. It started with a good gag about sheet music being a DSL for using the finite state machine otherwise known as a musician. However the really amazing thing was Chris’s abstraction of the score and subsequent transformations of the abstract score to end up with variations on the base canon he had chosen. Really amazing. Chris’s talk really shouldn’t have been a lightning talk, it is about the only quibble I had with the programming.
Sam Newman also had an excellent closing line in his lightning talk on Riemann, which was if people want Clojure to be adopted widely then the secret is to create great things with Clojure.
