Wednesday was the day that the conference proper started. It kicked off with with an insightful keynote by Sir Tony Hoare “The Science of Computing and the Engineering of Software” which reflected on the questions “Is Computing Science and is Software Engineering?” Very thought provoking indeed, particularly from someone with such a vast wealth of experience and wisdom in the field. However, I felt that it missed out a lot of the softer side of computing that QCon tends to represent so well through its agile tracks and general conversation of craftsmanship both really important aspects in my mind.

After the keynote I opted initially to see Ian Robinson present “Steering the Northwest Passage: Beginning an SOA Initiative.” Ian is wonderfully eloquent and this talk was a joy to watch as he discussed the importance of considering stories, capabilities, services and consumer-driven contracts in the process of beginning an SOA project. Afterwards I sat in the rest of Ola Bini’s ELITE  track (Emerging Languages In The Enterprise) to enjoy a veritable gaggle of interesting programming languages being introduced and used in an enterprise setting. Two of these talks really stood out to me. Firstly Martin Fowler’s “Three years of real-world Ruby” which discussed feedback from 41 ThoughtWorks Ruby projects. The conclusion seemed to be that Ruby was an excellent technology that ThoughtWorks intends to continue using: only 1 of the 41 projects thought that Ruby was a bad choice, and 4 other projects thought that Ruby didn’t add any additional value which left 36/41 projects declaring Ruby to have brought benefit over other standard enterprise choices such as Java and .NET stacks. Finally, Rich Hickey’s Clojure talk was also great. I think that Clojure is probably the most exciting upcoming language out there - particularly because it is both a lisp and has fiendishly cool support for concurrency. Rich has an enjoyably laid back style and it’s very clear that he really understands the material that he’s presenting which gave me further trust the overall design and many philosophical decisions that are part of Clojure. Sadly there was no discussion of Ioke but there’s always next year…