undef defun
When a major programming language conference comes to your home city, it seems churlish to ignore it. I have done precious little functional programming in the last fifteen years, and/but ICFP includes tutorials in the DEFUN development track, which ought to have met my hopes for abbreviated but intense introduction to new languages and concepts. So I attended two tutorials today - but they were kind of disappointing.
Apart from me, the first tutorial (on contemporary OCaml) seemed to mostly attract sympathy attendance from a few people who could quite happily have given the talk themselves. Since they were the majority, it was not unreasonable that the session was mostly derailed from its advertised purpose into a more academic ML family chat, but I still felt somewhat cheated - although perhaps not of very much, since what did survive of the original content seemed pretty poorly organized.
The afternoon session was substantially better, but I was still annoyed that Simon Thompson’s carefully prepared and well presented introduction to Erlang was too often interrupted by what seemed like culturally biased reactionary underinformed first impressions from some of the audience. The resulting delays prevented us from doing any of the planned coding exercises. So really I could just as well have read a book instead.
My overall verdict has to be that I wasted my time and money today. Sigh.
