The History of Programming Languages conference is pretty neat because programming languages designers describe how they developed the language and reflect on how it has progressed. There have only been three of these conferences with the first being in 1978, so it was nice that I was able to attend and listen to all these important people.

Just last semester at UIUC, I was attending a dynamic language virtual machine seminar where we went through quite a few Self papers – all of them had David Ungar in the author list. And it turns out the Ungar was around to give a presentation and ask some questions at the panel at the end of the conference.

David Ungar asking questions for Larry Wall (far right, Perl guy) and Olin Shivers (middle, Scheme) about their goals for making programming languages

I’m taking a quick “vacation” from Summer of Code and traveled down to San Diego for my first time. 😉 Actually, officially I’m here with my UIUC research group for the Federated Computer Research Conference (FCRC) to attend the International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA) – also my first time at one of these types of conferences (but there’ll be plenty more as I continue the Ph.D. program). FCRC is a combination of a bunch of other conferences, so there’ll be sessions about programming languages, theory, and more – it’ll be interesting to hear about the exciting new research in those fields as well.

The flight from San Jose was just over an hour, and we landed in the Commuter Terminal (so if you ever have a short flight out of SAN, make sure to go to CT and not Terminal 1 or 2). I met up with another of my advisor’s Ph.D. students, and we taxied to the hotel/convention center and took the trolley to Old Town to find some dinner.. mexican food! I’m sure there’ll be plenty more in the days to come before I leave Wednesday night.

About to land at SAN – flying past the baseball stadium

The last several days were.. filled with activity – gathering data and preparing a paper submission to MICRO-40. It’s my first time to submit a paper, and it’s mostly the research I did during the Masters portion of the degree, so it’ll be interesting to see how things work out.

Yay for screen multiplexing! Perhaps it’s more useful for my 12″ iBook G4, but ssh + screen to keep console sessions running from a single terminal is very useful when moving around remotely. Add in vim‘s own document splitting.. I’ve got 10+ virtual windows with many more subwindows to edit scripts like crazy. All this is going on with X windows opening and closing as tests start and finish…

After 100s of emails and last minute changes.. time for a nap.

Running a ton of tests remotely – X windows everywhere!

Wow. Such a long entry that it needs 2 parts? Well, I just wanted to separate the after-race excitement from the during-race fun. And because there’s too much text in the first part, I’ll just put pictures of places that Team UIUC visited.

Pacific Ocean + tons of wind = sandy beach

Our ride back to downtown decided to block traffic instead

Looking down Pierce from Castro

Corner of Duboce and Church = Castro Coffee

Powell Street Muni Station has an Apple Store

A very sunny day at Union Square