This week at the Lang.NET Symposium

It's very hard to attend an event on-campus.

Though my job is based in Redmond, I live in New England.

Coming in for an event, there are too many people to meet with, friends to bump into, things to catch up on, and regular work to get done (Not to mention the first couple days of Jet Lag)

Still, I've been spending most of my days at the Lang.NET Symposium.

Lang.NET is a small event (there are about 75 people in the room as I write this) filled with a who's who of Programming Languages.

Yesterday I sat next to Anders Hejlsberg while listening to Jason Zander's Opening Keynote.

Then Anders gave us a tour of cool new stuff in C# 3.0

Jim Hugunin (Jython, JPython, AspectJ, IronPython) gave a cool talk titled "Vision of the DRL) where he did a bit of Real Time Robotics programming using Microsoft Robotics Studio, Lego Robots, and Iron Python (not to mention a few balloon animal tricks !)

Then, we had Martin Malay on implementing a language that Targets the Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR)

Charles Nutter (The JRuby Guy)  and John Rose (VM Guy at Sun) talked about multiple language implementation on the Java VM

Today's highlights (so far) have included Erik Meijer talked top us about his recent project, Volta !

As I look around the room I see some great faces too.

Miguel de Icaza (The MONO and Moonlight guy!) is here and presenting tomorrow.

Tomas Petricek (The Phalanger Guy) is presenting later today.

John Lam (The IronRuby guy) is presenting tomorrow.

So will Luke Hoban who will present on F#

And just to add some icing on the cake....

Don Box has the last talk of the day on Modeling and Languages.

It sure is a hard room to feel smart in :)