(This one of a series of posts retelling my experience of attending QCon London 2009.)

This was my turn to contribute to QCon this year. I ran two tutorials: Advanced Ruby in the morning and Aesthetics of Programming Languages in the afternoon. Both presentations were pretty different which made the full day of speaking a little easier due to the variety. For the Ruby tutorial I gave a very high level overview of the concepts I believe to be core to the majority of decent Ruby code you may stumble over. The aim was to avoid syntax in order to pack as many concepts in as possible and is a technique I’ll definitely use again. Ola Bini attended and suggested that I might improve the aspect of tutorials that covered functional programming. I totally agree that these concepts could be dealt with in greater detail, however, the majority of attendees hadn’t used closures or blocks before so I focussed more on introducing them. Hopefully, as more and more people get exposure to functional languages (a major force in the QCon schedule this year) then concepts such as closures will become as obvious and understood as concepts such as classes and objects.

In the afternoon I gave a very open dialogue-based tutorial on programming language aesthetics. I framed communication as the basis for applying any metrics of beauty or aesthetics. Although it’s valuable to say that a given piece of programming language is beautiful, I believe that it’s more useful to debate the way that a given piece of programming language communicates its message. This therefore draws in key factors which can often be ignored: context, perspective, audience and intent. Also, as a general introduction to aesthetic frameworks we all discussed the differences between Modernism and Wabi-Sabi (two remarkably different frameworks). Essentially the key message I attempted to deliver was that I believe that conceptual efficiency is at least as important as computational efficiency. All in all it was very interesting to present and be part of.