KnitBot

Last night, I attended the Gala celebrating DC ACM‘s 50th Anniversary.  It
was a well-run affair, seemingly effective in its aim to pull together
visibility, awareness and support for the re-emerging ACM chapter.

The keynote speaker was Bjarne
Stroustrup, best known as the designer of the C++ programming
language.  He gave a very interesting talk, unveiling the history
of C++ and some of the thinking behind its evolution, as well as
pointing to the key updates in the now-finalized C++0x (likely
to be C++09).    I think some of the power of his
presentation came from the fact that he was articulate in sharing the
backing story, instead of just pummelling the audience with sample
code, feature lists, or other gee whiz factoids  about C++ or
other programming languages.  The slides (and a video of the
presentation) will be available on the DC ACM website, shortly.

Of course, this tickled a few neurons in my own brain, and left me
thinking wistfully of programming days.  While I always liked it,
it’s been a long, long time since I did any programming of note in any
language.  Long enough ago that object oriented programming was
just becoming mainstream, and I never got seriously into
it.   The world of programming, and the tools to support it,
have changed entirely.  It’s hard to tell which new practices are
actually de rigueur, and
which ones are simply stylistic.  

However, I have no particular need for programming in my current line
of work, and certainly don’t have so much spare time that I want to
fill  it by climbing up the learning curve again.  There
aren’t any simple things that need programming in my life — and
writing a full-on knitting design program, say,  using KnitML,  is hardly a
simple thing :-)