07 December 2010

Guy Steele Disassembles 40 Year Old Punchcard

Just a quick note to let all of you know who are not currently at the YOW! 2010 conference, some of the fun that you're missing out on.

Firstly it must be said that this is a world-class conference. The calibre of speakers is amazing. Dave Thomas and his team have done an incredible job of drawing this talent to Australia for this meeting of minds. I'll be posting more about this stuff later, but for now, here's a teaser photo from one of my favourite sessions, Guy Steele's "How to Think about Parallel Programming--Not!


In this photo, Guy is disassembling his own 40 year old self-modifing code, starting with a punch card and an old manual (which he admitted to still owning). He demonstrates his deserved bare-metal hacker street cred. Then half-way through the talk he shifts gears into real parallel programming in Fortress. I was quite exhausted after that one!