SD West 2004, Tuesday (evening) Update
The keynote at lunch was given by Allan Vermeulen, CTO of Amazon.com. I thought it might be just a big Amazon pitch, but it was actually very good. He discussed how Amazon hires and fosters independence and innovation within its developer community. They do a lot of things that make sense, like giving a small group ownership of a business or technical function, then turning them loose for a month to come up with any type of improvements that they think make best sense for the business. This has resulted in a number of high-value functions being added to their site.
I had planned on attending a UML design class during the afternoon, but on a whim decided to go to a course on XQuery. End result: XQuery is a very interesting technology and the big-name vendors are lined up behind it, which is going to give it legs. Jason Hunter, a member of the W3C XQuery group and co-creator of JDOM, gave the class and provided a survey of the language, its strengths, and it weaknesses. The language is functional, not written in XML (unlike XSL), supports dynamic and static typing, can query anything that can be made to look like XML (XML, relational DBs, etc.) and feels and looks a lot like ocaml. It's got a few syntax evaluation quirks, and the whole namespace setup that it inherits from XML can be tricky, but is very powerful. Mark Logic and BEA Liquid Data are the commercial versions to check out today. After the spec is completed, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft will have something to add.
There was a panel this evening called Programmers At Work: Interviews with 19 Programmers Who Shaped the Computer Industry. The panelist were: Charles Simonyi, Dan Bricklin, Robert Carr, Jef Raskin, Andy Hertzfeld, Scott Kim, Jaron Lanier, and Susan Lammers.
If you are in software development and don't recognize at least half those names, you must be living under a rock. This was one of the best talks that I've ever been to. There were lots of ideas and opinions about where programming has been, what's been done right and wrong, and where things need to go. The general consensus is that the job of programming needs a lot of revolutionary work to take it to the next level.
Be sure to check Dan Bricklin's link, there are pictures and his notes about the event.
8:18:04 PM 
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