LL3 question

[Neelakantan Krishnaswami <address@hidden>]

A (late) question about LL3: I'm curious about what you think the most
surprising talk was. By surprising, I don't only mean good, I mean
which talk made you think about languages in a surprising new way.

When I was at LL2, the talk that surprised me the most was Oliver
Steele's talk about LZX, the Laszlo language. The whole package was a
surprise -- I was surprised to realize that other languages could
target the Flash VM; I was surprised at how compact constraint-based
descriptions of GUIs could be; and overall I was surprised at how
"retrospectively obvious" their strategy was.

By way of contrast, Tod Proebsting's talk was "good", in that it was
very well-presented and convincingly argued, but it mostly confirmed
my beliefs rather than adding to them or revising them. I left his
talk thinking "I'm glad such a smart person thinks mostly the same as
I do," whereas I left Oliver's talk thinking, "Wow, why didn't I think
of that?"

-- 
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk@cs.cmu.edu