Thursday, April 12, 2007

cyberdyne

I went to the NEPLS conference at Tufts University on Wednesday. It was a lot of fun; I got to hear programming language theory talks and meet with other people interested in the same sort of crazy things that pull my attention. I did like Dave's talk: the idea of collapsing idempotent type checks to preserve space seemed perfectly reasonable. I wonder if any of that will trickle back into PLT's contract system.

The last presentation, on Spatial Computing, was especially fascinating. At a first glance, it seemed ridiculous, and the scope of the project so breathtakingly absurd. I clamped my hands over my mouth to muffle my giggles. But as the speaker presented more and more, the whimsical thought came into to me: maybe this is how Skynet begins.

I hope that I too will someday build something that brings both laughter and pondering thoughts. And I'll also keep in mind to try avoiding the development of systems that might lead to the creation of bloodthirsty androids.

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