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As a few of you know, two of my co-workers and I are attending the NFJS (No Fluff Just Stuff) Software Symposium this weekend. Here’s my take on day 1:

1. Building DSLs in Static and Dynamic Languages (Neal Ford)
– DSLs seem to be one of those things that most people see the advantage of but 99% of them never get to the point of actually implementing. Neal’s main example of a DSL in a real world situation is walking into Starbucks and saying “Large, iced, triple mocha, skim milk” (or something like that). His example is meant to show that certain domains (coffee shop) have their own lexicons (”Large, iced, triple mocha, skim milk”) for a reason and that we shouldn’t ignore that in our daily development. Neal also showed some great examples of using method-chaining (why don’t we write our Hibernate Criterion methods this way?) to achieve a sort of internal DSL in which your class setters always return the instance that you are dealing with. I thought this was one of the best seminars I have seen at NFJS so far (hence my rambling).

2. Productive Programmer: Acceleration, Focus, and Indirection (Neal Ford)
– Like Eric, I have many new tricks (Windows and Mac) I want to try thanks to this seminar. Now if I only had admin access on my PC so I could actually use some of these tips and tricks… This Monday I am turning off my email, putting a wall and ceiling on my cube, and blaming it on Neal.

3. Productive Programmer: Automation and Canonicality (Neal Ford)
– Man-crush? Nah he’s just a good speaker and I honestly think that these “productive programmer” seminars contain the most “real-world usable” information at NFJS. “Canonicality” is my new favorite word.

4. Ted Neward [Key Note]: Why the Next Five Years Will Be About Languages
– Ted is an awesome speaker. He’s opinionated, funny, and wears .NET t-shirts to Java conferences. 90% of what he was talking about was just plain over my head but nonetheless it was a very interesting keynote. Did anyone else know that “Pizza” was a programming language?