bithead redux

If you follow my twitter stream at all, you know I went to WWDC this year.

I’ve been wanting to go for years. I find it hard to control the enthusiasm I had for the experience.

It was a good challenge to get through. I was around very smart people. I was at a technical conference that actually gave me more interesting technical information than I could take in. I swear, stuff was bouncing off of my brain during the Friday sessions. I knew the stuff was important, I knew the whys and the hows, but the what’s just ricocheted right off of my grey matter.

One of the things that I really want to write about is that how I feel like I’m finally coming back home to Smalltalk. One by one the things I miss are being incorporated into Objective-C. ObjC 2.0 was cool, [redacted] is going to be better. It is unfortunate that the details that make me happy about [redacted] are covered by NDA.

Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL are mentioned on Apple’s public pages, so I can actually mention them. Grand Central Dispatch is tied directly to the technology I tried to allude to in the previous paragraph, so perhaps soon someone else will mention it and I can stop being annoyingly coy about it.

I still use languages like Python and Ruby, but I’m finding myself drawn more to coding directly in ObjC and Cocoa, or perhaps Nu. I’m in a period of my programming life that I want a language that can go really high level and really low level, sometimes in the space of the same method.

The best thing about WWDC08? It brought me back into a technical area that is new and vibrant, one that inspires real excitement for me. It’s almost like I’ve had to spend years trying to downplay the fact that deep down inside, I just prefer the way that Apple does things, and I have for a very long time.

It feels very good to come home.