Emerging Languages Conference

I sometimes think about what I would have done with the $5,000 Jeff Atwood gave away to the ScrewTurn Wiki project if he had given it to me instead. Here was what they had to say about using the money.

The grant money is still untouched. It’s not easy to use it. Website hosting fees are fully covered by ads and donations, and there are no other direct expenses to cover. I thought it would be cool to launch a small contest with prizes for the best plugins and/or themes, but that is not easy because of some laws we have here in Italy that render the handling of a contest quite complex.

What would you suggest?

A part of me wonders if it wouldn’t have turned out similarly for me.

But days like this make me realize that I would spend that money to go to Portland and attend the Emerging Languages Conference. I also had the experience of creating my own logos for MetaSharp which I would have happily paid an artist to make for me instead (which I think turned out pretty well despite my not being an artist).

Here it is, btw.

Anyway, in addition to sounding really interesting the people of the emerging languages conference apparently have a great sense of humor as well. Here is one of my new favorite quotes taken from the newly created google group:

That’s the beauty of functional programming — you can almost say
anything and make it sound good.  For example, I fully plan to support
higher-order gouda.

– Fogus

I tried to tweet this but Fogus irreverently failed to contain his wit to less that 140 characters. Also… check out coffee script, very cool.