Hi,
On 22 maj 2007, at 16.48, Salve J Nilsen wrote:
1) is definitely true, but that could be said for any topic -
giving an interesting presentation by itself isn't an easy task,
and finding enough people to fill a conference with them is even
more difficult.
Yes and that's why I don't think we should set a topic for the
workshop but rather a "theme" as Erwan suggested. Themes are broader
and thus easier to bend =)
But wrt. 2), I think you shouldn't assume people aren't interested.
Remember there are several types of programmers, of which the two
most important (IMHO) are the "work" programmers (who just want to
get the job done) and the "play" programmers (who find motivation
and excitement in programming). Which of these target audicences
should NPW'08 primarily cater to? Do you want to mainly attract
programmers who are of the curious, playful type - or programmers
that are just going to work every day to make money?
If I remember correctly the primary goal we set out years ago (2004?)
for NPW was 'to raise the awareness of Perl in the Nordic countries'.
Awareness as both -in- and -about- Perl. To comply with -in- we
probably want to target developers who already are somewhat versed in
Perl (both academic and professional) and for -about- we want to
target developers of other languages mostly in the business world but
also teachers and those who decide what schools should teach.
And to make it even harder to know what audience we target we also
have to add our sponsors to the equation. They'll want value for
their money.
I'd say the academic world needs a bit of input from us hackers on
"how to get things done". So it's a good idea.
Hm. Maybe. Could be that you're a bit too "general" in the
assertion you make about academia, but for some parts of it I'm
sure you're right.
Yeah, I might be generalizing but that was my conclusion from my
brief stint at KTH when I had been working professionally as a
developer for almost 10 years.
Well, I'd rather ask "How many professional programmers can become
interested in these issues?" Especially if we can find people to
hold interesting talks about such subjects (but this of course
depends on you actually _wanting_ talks like that, and if you
don't, then you close off quite a bit of possibilities in that
direction.)
Since there are already workshops and conferences on specific topics
I think we should try to keep NPW quite general when it comes to
subjects and trying to find a good mix. That said people are free to
submit talk proposals on meta-programming and runtimes for dynamic
languages and they'll probably get accepted =)
/Claes
