![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I am back from a 1.5 week trip to Eugene, Oregon that I didn't tell any of you about, because I'm a bad livejournalist.
I was doing this thing. It was fun. There were 30-35 attendees (not counting the lecturers); they were almost all graduate students in programming languages. It was nice to be in a crowd of people where I could make a joke about continuations and get laughs, as opposed to groans or an unconfortable uncomprehending silence.
There were lots of people from all over the US, and some Europeans as well (Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, France, UK). When Adriaan, James, and John spontaneously burst into an animated conversation in French, I winced at how little of it I actually recognized. I was talking to David later (he speaks 5 languages) about how I felt almost pained by being only an English speaker, when I thought of the perfect metaphor for my situation. To me, speaking only one language feels like being a grown adult still living in my parents' basement. I hadn't realized how deeply uncomfortable I had become with being monolingual until I had that conversation.
So, in my ancient and revered tradition of setting ambitious goals that I will ultimately fail to fulfill, I would like to learn at least two of: Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Russian. Not necessarily in that order.
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rjmccall, NB: I met a fine fellow named Tom Harke at the summer school, who is a CS grad at Portland State (pdx). I have a feeling (no concrete evidence, just a feeling) that the two of you would get along quite well. If he doesn't recognize "mutual friend Dave", some combination of "summer school", "tie dye", and (especially) "Mao" should do the trick.
Oh, right. During the summer school, I wore only tie dye shirts, bought four new ones (total now 16), and played a lot of Mao. I have this sudden compulsion to make a web page dedicated to my tie dye shirt collection. I also have a much more latent compulsion to start making my own tie dye creations, at long last.
Orc is starting to sizzle and bubble now. Lots and lots of work to be done. We're searching for a new denotational semantics using event structures. I've been thinking a lot about transactions (inspired by Grossman's lectures on AtomCaml) and adaptive workflow (inspired by Hicks's lectures on Proteus), as well as the relationship between Orc sites and diamond types in modal logic. Gobs and gobs of implementation work needed; I need to suppress the urge to reimplement the interpreter in 5 different languages just for giggles, and instead focus on embellishing and stabilizing the existing Java version.
I've been having huge concentration problems, entangled with my usual "cannot reach stable day-to-day life state" difficulties. I hope these issues fade away soon, as the coming months will require a kind of focus typically reserved for long-range astronomical devices and doctoral theses.
I was doing this thing. It was fun. There were 30-35 attendees (not counting the lecturers); they were almost all graduate students in programming languages. It was nice to be in a crowd of people where I could make a joke about continuations and get laughs, as opposed to groans or an unconfortable uncomprehending silence.
There were lots of people from all over the US, and some Europeans as well (Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, France, UK). When Adriaan, James, and John spontaneously burst into an animated conversation in French, I winced at how little of it I actually recognized. I was talking to David later (he speaks 5 languages) about how I felt almost pained by being only an English speaker, when I thought of the perfect metaphor for my situation. To me, speaking only one language feels like being a grown adult still living in my parents' basement. I hadn't realized how deeply uncomfortable I had become with being monolingual until I had that conversation.
So, in my ancient and revered tradition of setting ambitious goals that I will ultimately fail to fulfill, I would like to learn at least two of: Spanish, French, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Russian. Not necessarily in that order.
rjmccall, NB: I met a fine fellow named Tom Harke at the summer school, who is a CS grad at Portland State (pdx). I have a feeling (no concrete evidence, just a feeling) that the two of you would get along quite well. If he doesn't recognize "mutual friend Dave", some combination of "summer school", "tie dye", and (especially) "Mao" should do the trick.Oh, right. During the summer school, I wore only tie dye shirts, bought four new ones (total now 16), and played a lot of Mao. I have this sudden compulsion to make a web page dedicated to my tie dye shirt collection. I also have a much more latent compulsion to start making my own tie dye creations, at long last.
Orc is starting to sizzle and bubble now. Lots and lots of work to be done. We're searching for a new denotational semantics using event structures. I've been thinking a lot about transactions (inspired by Grossman's lectures on AtomCaml) and adaptive workflow (inspired by Hicks's lectures on Proteus), as well as the relationship between Orc sites and diamond types in modal logic. Gobs and gobs of implementation work needed; I need to suppress the urge to reimplement the interpreter in 5 different languages just for giggles, and instead focus on embellishing and stabilizing the existing Java version.
I've been having huge concentration problems, entangled with my usual "cannot reach stable day-to-day life state" difficulties. I hope these issues fade away soon, as the coming months will require a kind of focus typically reserved for long-range astronomical devices and doctoral theses.
