My impression of Chris is that he is like a spider and only giving
this talk with a couple of legs, while the others hack or send email
or something. This is a compliment in case you can’t tell, his
attention wasn’t noticeably elsewhere.

Why open source? According to Chris, “No one can tell us no”.
That’s as good an explanation as I’ve heard.

He talks about the reasons for the Summer of Code but my notes
fail to record anything really definite. I think I was a bit out of
it during this talk. He shows a lot of nice quotes from SoC students
and some obscure demos, like the USB code for some calculator.

Google seems like the current company for smart people. People
not at Google, you are hereby now dumb or misguided.

Geir on Harmony

This isn’t a technical talk and is more or less a repeat of his
JavaOne talk. I didn’t take many notes since I’m already involved in
Harmony. Geir gives a good talk. I learned things from it that I
need to mention in my future talks.

Geir does mention the whole desktop thing and the Gnome language
battles. I wonder how that played at JavaOne or whether Sun folks
even find it relevant. My impression is that they generally
don’t.

Ted Leung on Chandler

Ted is an interesting
speaker though a bit too
hot for the medium: a darkened conference room with a video
projector. I had heard of Chandler
before, a long time ago, but lost track of it. It seems to be outside
the mainstream of open source development, at least as I perceive
it.

It isn’t clear why someone would use Chandler and not Evolution.
I used Evolution for email reading while I was at OSCON, and while I
wasn’t blown away by it (Thunderbird was just as good for me, but I
only use gnus in real life), it seemed completely reasonable.
Likewise for calendaring.

Actually, that is a bit unfair. Chandler uses wxWindows and
is more cross platform than Evolution (though not Mozilla stuff).
This is a proven good thing for free software.

Ted talks about writing your own Chandler “parcels” (plugins).
Chandler has an interesting internal architecture, from what I can
tell everything is stored in a database, and the GUI itself is
serialized into it.

The Chandler parcel descriptors are in XML, though they are moving
toward having them just be plain Python code. Their users hate the
XML and (like the Ruby on Rails talk discusses later) it is simpler
and more robust to just write idiosyncratic code in the primary
language. The XML bits look similar to what Eclipse does, and I gather
they face the same kinds of dependency handling problems as does the
java world as a whole. You’d think we would all collaborate on a
solution to this.

Guido on Python

I tried to go to a bunch of talks on topics that I normally don’t
follow. This wasn’t hard, as it turns out OSCON is a big Perl
gathering — a fact everybody except me seems to have known — and
there were also Ruby and Python and other contingents there.

Guido’s message is that Python continues to mutate. One concrete
mutation I took from this talk is a new with operator,
which is in essence the C++
RAII idiom abstracted away from object construction. This is a
nice idea, and java could probably benefit from it, but … I can’t
help thinking that all of these scripting languages should be
obsoleted by lisp. (I know, I know, these decisions are as faddish as
any other fashion, a fact that continues to offend the remaining
mathematical parts of my aesthetic.) Anyway, Python’s
with construct is a trivial lisp macro. We’ll see this
same thing come up for Perl and Ruby, in future posts.

Another thing I learned is that Twisted has some nice work
deferral wrappers, which would have been useful when I was more
actively hacking on Build… except I looked and they seem to be
networking-related, and this is trivial with continuations and makes
all these circumlocutions seem absurd.