Only a few hours left (part 1)

The PDC keynote is going to be in a few hours.  And while i won't be there, i'm definitely going to be watching it live (to access it go here).  There's a lot i'm going to want to blog about at that point, but to help out my later posts i'm goign to start by presenting a short series of lead-up articles that discuss the state of affairs today, and how some of what we're working on can make a certain programming style much nicer.