It's an interesting being "industry" at a somewhat academic conference (although I think this is less academic than most). Less than quarter of attendees are from industry and they seem to be a very diverse bunch. Students and faculty are more cohesive groups, so I think they're easier to cater to.
The Keynote
Barbara Liskov got well deserved applause for her reprise of her Turing award acceptance speech, talking about her search for ways to raise the level of abstraction in order to enhance the expressiveness of programs. She put herself clearly in the Dijkstra camp, so she believes that ease of reading source code (especially other people's code) is more important than ease of writing it and she believes that we want to make it easier for people to reason about the behaviour and correctness of the code.
She talked about some of the papers that really influenced her research, starting (if I recall correctly) with Dijkstra's famous "Goto Considered Harmful" that was published as a letter to CACM (back when it was a serious research journal). It was interesting to see how there were nuggets of insight and how much of a struggle it was for researchers to come up with ideas we take for granted today, such as how to do data abstraction with encapsulation.
The message I heard was that there are still many areas where the level of abstraction we work with is still too low.
Onward! Papers
These lived up to my expectations -- vaguely plausible to borderline crazy.
Jonathan Edwards' work on Coherence (a language where statements inside a "co-action" all run simultaneously from the point of view of the programmer) looks brilliant. We'd all like to be rid of ordering-related bugs in our code. Unfortunately there's no implementation -- he says it's more important to get the definition right first. The idea of a "co-action" works perfectly in the rigged example but how does it work for something that is more realistic?
"Traditional assignment considered harmful" seemed mostly provocative, as it seemed to be saying a "swap values" operator would be easier to work with than a traditional assignment operator. A member of the audience trenchantly argued that the thing on the right of the assignment operator is an expression, not just a simple value (and it seems to me that blows a huge hole in the argument).
The "Silhouette" talk wins top marks for eccentric presentation style. The professor made the slides in the presentation deck from one to the next on behalf of the grad student presenter, but the presenter was in a film (possibly Quicktime?) inside the slides. It worked somewhat. The idea is to explore the concept of using shapes and the way they nest and overlap to explore program design in a highly visual way. It's extremely fuzzy at the moment, so it's hard to judge if it might be worthwhile. Every other visual programming metaphor has pretty much failed, but this one at least looks a little different.
Finally, there was something called "PI", where PI is of course the Greek letter. This is a kind of a meta programming language, although the presenter insisted on calling it a pattern language. It was built to scratch in itch (always a good sign) that the presenter ran into while trying to build languages for domain experts. It seems to be in the Lisp/Scheme family in the sense that you type expressions at a prompt and some expressions cause changes to the runtime. However, it goes much further in allowing new syntax to be added just by adding definitions to be added to the grammar that PI understands. It looks like a lot of existing ideas packaged slightly differently, but from what I can tell there is an implementation.