Tuesday morning, Simon Peyton-Jones held the not very enviable position as “I’ll try to wake up a bunch of tired, hung-over nerds”. And although he himself felt like he was tethered to a pole, acting as the sacrificial goat in some kind of bizarre developer ritual, speaking for myself and many others, I’m sure, I can say: Boy, did he wake us up!
The talk was of the kind that makes my rather naïve brain think it’s suddenly grown extremely clever, all of a sudden being able to grasp complicated subjects all by its own. And that’s the magic of a truly brilliant speaker, working his miracles by catalyzing thought rather than just dragging the audience through slide after slide filled with correct facts.
The discussion after the talk was centered around the question: will enough people be smart enough to learn to code in Haskell, and is the benefits large enough compared to traditional OOP. Not surprisingly, no clear answer was given, but the talk sure did – once again – open my eyes to the fact that my day-to-day languages might one day allow me to write code with a much higher level of expressiveness.
Returning to the question of my naïvité, I like to keep it at a level where I’m not really allowing myself to know the true answer to the question of whether I or Simon Peyton-Jones were the cleverer. What I know is that surely I was the one that learnt the most.
Now all I hope for is that JAOO 2010 will bring me Simon Peyton-Jones explaining what a monad is – if any single person in the world is able to teach me, he must be the one.
(+11 rating, 6 votes)
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