Our ikangai development team (i.e., martin ) is currently in Disney Land, Orlando attending the OOPSLA conference. The conference is an opportunity to look at current developments in academia concerning computer languages. It is amazing, how the OOPSLA people look at things in a very detailed way. For example, there are talks about garbage collection (yes! the ugly stuff every Objective-C programmer knows as memory management) or domain specific languages (and lots of other technical stuff).
So far, the most inspiring presentation was the keynote by Barbara Liskov, who won the Turing Award this year. The talk gave an overview how we arrived at modern programming languages (which use take for granted) and touched briefly how everyday concepts (like iteration) were designed. In case, you didn’t know, Barbara Liskov invented the Liskov Substitution Principle:

If for each object o1 of type S there is an object o2 of type T such that for all programs P defined in terms of T, the behavior of P is unchanged when o1 is substituted for o2 then S is a subtype of T.

Simple, isn’t it ?

Your ikangai team

Tags: Conference, Liskov, OOPSLA