Yesterday Gregor Kiczales came to give a talk in the Computer Science department here at UVIC. It was the talk he gave at OOPSLA last year, and was just fascinating.
He talked about Lucy Suchman, and how her research goes into sociological analyses of user interfaces, and I really connected with those ideas. I really need to read her book Human-Machine Reconfigurations, the small excerpts that he presented resonated strongly with the way I view the world.
He also talked about Brian Cantwell Smith and his book On the Origin of Objects. Some interesting ideas here as well, I was reminded strongly of semotics, with signs and signifiers, and how meaning is constructed by each of us.
He also talked a bit about Aspect-Oriented Programming, objects and Mylyn.
Too bad that it's all in Java, I've done some large projects with Java, and I just don't find it a very satisifying environment to work inside. I much prefer something like Ruby or Python, and I've been having a lot of fun with ECMAScript languages, like haXe, Flash and Javascript.
