Spain.JS, day 1
Jul. 6th, 2013 08:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
acbI'm in Madrid for the SpainJS JavaScript conference. (As my recent paid work has involved JavaScript, I figured it'd be worth going to.) I flew in on Wednesday.
The conference so far has been interesting; yesterday was opened by a keynote talk by Douglas Crockford (of JavaScript: The Good Parts fame) about programming language design, with the hook that JavaScript is the ideal virtual machine for running other languages, being both highly portable, the focus of optimisation efforts, and sufficiently functional to implement an exquisitely elegant parsing algorithm rejected by the LISP community in the 70s because they didn't like syntax. Other than that, there was a talk from a Mozilla guy about creating a mobile platform where all APIs are open to JavaScript (though some require signed/trusted code, for security reasons), a demo from a Microsoft guy of writing a JavaScript game in 30 minutes (using mostly open technologies, though hinting at Windows API access), a talk by two guys from Spotify on how their player app is actually a Chromium-based browser running a web app and how their web widgets communicate with other apps, and a thought-provoking piece about efficiently implementing the Game of Life using persistent data structures. Some bits were more interesting than others; for example, the talk from the Intel people about Tizen (a Linux-based OS for phones and smart TVs, I believe) seemed to be mostly a content-free marketing spiel with a plea for developers to write apps for the damned thing for a chance to win money. Compared to the Mozilla OS talk, it came across as particularly uncompelling.
I also ended up giving a lightning talk about my recent experiments in using JavaScript to write user interfaces for Max for Live (slides are here). It was only a five-minute talk, so I had to speed through it, but it seems to have been reasonably well received, and led to some discussion at the conference drinks.
Other than that, Madrid has been good; it's in the high 30s here, which is quite a change from it being 10º in Reykjavík a week ago.
The conference so far has been interesting; yesterday was opened by a keynote talk by Douglas Crockford (of JavaScript: The Good Parts fame) about programming language design, with the hook that JavaScript is the ideal virtual machine for running other languages, being both highly portable, the focus of optimisation efforts, and sufficiently functional to implement an exquisitely elegant parsing algorithm rejected by the LISP community in the 70s because they didn't like syntax. Other than that, there was a talk from a Mozilla guy about creating a mobile platform where all APIs are open to JavaScript (though some require signed/trusted code, for security reasons), a demo from a Microsoft guy of writing a JavaScript game in 30 minutes (using mostly open technologies, though hinting at Windows API access), a talk by two guys from Spotify on how their player app is actually a Chromium-based browser running a web app and how their web widgets communicate with other apps, and a thought-provoking piece about efficiently implementing the Game of Life using persistent data structures. Some bits were more interesting than others; for example, the talk from the Intel people about Tizen (a Linux-based OS for phones and smart TVs, I believe) seemed to be mostly a content-free marketing spiel with a plea for developers to write apps for the damned thing for a chance to win money. Compared to the Mozilla OS talk, it came across as particularly uncompelling.
I also ended up giving a lightning talk about my recent experiments in using JavaScript to write user interfaces for Max for Live (slides are here). It was only a five-minute talk, so I had to speed through it, but it seems to have been reasonably well received, and led to some discussion at the conference drinks.
Other than that, Madrid has been good; it's in the high 30s here, which is quite a change from it being 10º in Reykjavík a week ago.
