OOPSLA - Day three

The morning keynote on creativity was okay but marred by a couple of gratuitous political comments. The wikipedia talk provided some interesting insights into what is free like images of art work from museums.

But Sussman's talk sparked my old love of Lisp and Scheme. One of his ideas is getting children exposed to programming as a language for expressing ideas is interesting. He also thinks more like an engineer in that creativity does not just spring out of nowhere and solve a problem but it needs some training to help the mind focused. Later Foote talked about the history of programming in a way only he can do. Again the idea of dynamic versus static languages came up. I too miss Lisp and Smalltalk. And I have to say, for well trained software engineers the type system seems could be more overhead that it is worth. Now off to a another meeting on sharing past OOPSLA memories.