ACCU Keynote, Day 2

This morning’s keynote wasn’t nearly as interesting as Bjarne’s yesterday. I say this even though I have little desire to code in C++; I still enjoyed Bjarne’s keynote from a purly theortical perspective.

Jim Coplien gave a talk entitled “The Curse of Symmetry”, but I’ll be damned if I could figure out exactly what that curse was by the end of the hour. All I could figure out was, he thought it was bad, even though starfish and milk drops have some symmetrical properties. Oh, and Bjarne isn’t symmetrical. I was actually sitting directly behind Bjarne, and it was more interesting to watch him shake his head in what appeared to be anguish as Jim spoke. So at least I wasn’t alone. Who knows, maybe I was just part of the 50% that didn’t get it, but the other 50% loved it. I guess by my own definition, that’d make the keynote a success.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the highlight of the keynote, which was a joke told by an audience member. I have no idea what the context was, but the joke was rather amusing:

So America was helping Iraq write their new constitution. But then they realized they weren’t using their own, so they could just give it to Iraq.