Portland, O Portland

So today is my last full day in Portland, and due to the weather and the conference activities I haven’t actually been out of the hotel since Tuesday evening. (It was genuinely icy at times yesterday.) I’m going to have to go out today, though, as the conference is over just before lunch and the hotel restaurant is your basic $50 steak place. The clouds appear to be thinning this morning, so with luck even if it’s cold it might not be wet or windy. We shall see.

My talk went well yesterday, and there were a number of interesting discussions involving Tcl 9, the next generation of Tcl; the feeling here, so far as I can judge, seems to be that Tcl 9 should be an evolution of Tcl 8 as far as the language syntax goes, rather than a revolutionary change. Most of the work that’s been is focussing on compiling Tcl bytecodes to native code, which is very cool; it could make Tcl very much faster. That would be revolutionary in practice, while (with luck) living the syntax alone.

As for me, I’m suffering from my usual complaints at this point in the conference: my brain is full, and though an introvert I’ve been relentlessly social since I landed on Tuesday. I’m looking forward to the flight home tomorrow.