Dr. Dobb's Journal December, 2005
The two trips blur into one music- and food-suffused montage. Street scenes and snatches of Dixieland, faces and voices, all come back to me stripped of context: fragmentary images that bob to the surface and float away.
A colorfully dressed stranger in the French Quarter offering to bet me that he could guess where I got my shoes. A young woman with braided hair sitting on the sidewalk on Magazine Street playing a saw. Tiny boys who don't look like they've been walking all that long tap-dancing in the street as tourists weave around them. A trumpet player in a baby-blue sportscoat sitting across the table from me and talking about software development.
The trumpet player is also a piano player, composer, ventriloquist, short-story writer, cartoonist, C programmer, Dr. Dobb's columnist, and friend. Al Stevens calls Cocoa Beach, Florida, home—but either there or here in New Orleans, the baby-blue sportscoat looks appropriate. Al's in town for OOPSLA, too.
I remember that dinner, and can almost pick out all the faces around the table. It was, like every meal I ever ate in New Orleans, memorable. Many of my memories of New Orleans involve food.
Eating beignets for breakfast, getting powdered sugar in my beard. The best beignets, I'm told, are to be found at CDM, the famous Cafe Du Monde, operating in the French Quarter since 1862. Right on the bank of the Mississippi River.
"Nowhere," John McPhee wrote in an essay two years before that OOPSLA conference, "is New Orleans higher than the river's natural bank...The river goes through town like an elevated highway."
In National Geographic
And the Times-Picayune
They forecast the apocalypse
Said it was coming soon
—David Rovics, "New Orleans"
I'm a coffee drinker and I want to like New Orleans coffee, which by unvarying tradition is always cut with chicory. Maybe it's an acquired taste. Maybe it just doesn't pack enough caffeine kick for my long-established habit. As I am a reader by even longer-established habit, I read the street signs: Abundance, Pleasure, and of course Desire. There's a bus line here called "Cemeteries." I read the brochures, read that the chicory tradition began during the Civil War, when New Orleanians stretched war-scarce coffee with the roasted and ground root of the locally harvested endive plant in response to the Union blockade of the Port of New Orleans.
In the century and a half since the Civil War, the Port of New Orleans had grown to become the largest port in the United States and the fifth largest port in the world. Until September 2005.
I remember eating po-boys for lunch. Po-boys are something like submarine sandwiches, crunchy-crusted French bread with just about any filling, served plain or dressed. But it is specifically oyster po-boys that I remember with such fondness.
Seafood and fresh-water fish or shellfish are a big part of New Orleans cuisine. I remember snacking on crawdads spilled out on newspaper, taking a taxi to a dinner that I am pretty sure featured fish, in a good restaurant in an old mansion in the Garden District. I understand that this area was among the least affected by the storm and its aftermath. "In New Orleans," McPhee wrote in 1987, "income and elevation can be correlated on a literally sliding scale: the Garden District on the highest level, Stanley Kowalski in the swamp."
Later, walking through the French Quarter with a drink in one hand and a snack in the other, between ornate balconies overhanging the sidewalks, surfeited but tempted by the good smells all around. New Orleans had more well-known chefs than any other city its size, and more good places to eat. Now even famed television celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse's three New Orleans restaurants are closed, his web site turned into an online contact point for refugee employees widely scattered in the New Orleans diaspora.
My memory is muddy,
What's this river that I'm in?
New Orleans is sinking
And I don't wanna swim
—The Tragically Hip, "New Orleans Is Sinking"
I remember checking into a French Quarter hotel on a hidden courtyard down some anonymous alley. Dinner that night in a restaurant so tucked away on an alley/ courtyard that I don't know how we even found it. The live music may have led us there, although live music is like air in the French Quarter. The next day finding in a funky little curio shop a cleverly framed Picasso print that we had to have. Hidden treasures.
Some of these memories are from that camping trip, others from OOPSLA. They run together like they'd been left out in the rain. This memory is definitely from the camping trip, though:
That summer, we had come cross-country in our camper van, arriving in New Orleans late in the evening. Looking for a campground in a black downpour, we ended up we-had-no-idea-where outside of town next to some body of water. Lake Pontchartrain? The Mississippi River? It was too dark and rainy to tell and the people running the place spoke a dialect of English we didn't understand. Parked in our van a few dozen feet horizontally and maybe two feet vertically from the troubled surface of the dark water, thunder booming around us and the water rising, we didn't get much sleep. In the morning, we realized that we had never been in any real danger.
But the memory of that night comes back to me vividly these days as I think about the catastrophe of New Orleans 2005.
I added up the preregistration and on-site registration lists, and came up with 1626 registered attendees of OOPSLA '89. You may have to just take my word for it that this was a lot of people for an object-oriented programming conference back then. It was easy to conclude, I concluded, that there was an object-oriented programming revolution underway.
Today, the object-oriented paradigm is taken for granted, and proponents of newer approaches like Aspect-Oriented Programming position their paradigm against it, like a candidate running against an incumbent. But in 1989, OOP was the coming thing. I thought it might be interesting to look back at some of the highlights of that conference at the New Orleans Hyatt Regency in the first week of October 1989.
The exhibit floor showed which companies considered OOP important enough to rent booth space: Digitalk, The Whitewater Group, and Interactive Software Engineering had prominent placement, as did Apple and Borland. On the other hand, Microsoft didn't exhibit, although they had plenty of employees at the conference.
The conference itself was chaired by Kent Beck, currently a neighbor of mine here in Southern Oregon. Kent was with Apple then, and he and Ward Cunningham gave a talk on the teaching of OOP. Before the regular sessions there were two days of tutorials on what were considered the most important OOP environments, including Smalltalk, C++, NextStep, and a portable C++ class library for UNIX called ET++.
The keynote address was by Peter Wegner, who wrote the first book on Ada and got into OOP because of his perception of the deficiencies of Ada for software engineering. He left little doubt that he considered software engineering to be the proper goal for OOP. Wegner's latest book, out this year from Springer-Verlag, is called Interactive Computation: The New Paradigm.
The '89 conference marked a new stage of maturity for OOP: Kent Beck explained that, while previous OOPSLA conferences had included sessions on such related topics as general software engineering, user interface design, and databases, this year's conference would focus more tightly on OOP theory, OOP language design and implementation, and concurrency.
There's a perpetual problem for those who would define and name paradigms in technology: As soon as you assign two or more attributes to a paradigm, someone will come up with an approach that includes all but one of the attributes. It was clear at that '89 conference that there would be no precise definition of OOP that would encompass all the interesting work going on in the area. The SELF language, the subject of one session, is a good example. Can a language that has objects and inheritance but that lacks classes qualify as object oriented?
Software engineering and the tantalizing vision of interchangeable software parts was the subject of a number of sessions. Brad Cox, who had written a new object-oriented version of C called "Objective-C," led a discussion on what was optimistically called the "Software Engineering Revolution." Brad's still on the ramparts in that revolution, but he mostly programs these days in Java, Ruby, Python, and Perl, rather than his own language.
A number of sessions described progress in real-world applications of OOP. I don't know if you'd consider Star Wars, also known as the Strategic Defense Initiative, real-world, but other presentations addressed the application of OOP to practical issues in commercial software development, CAE/CAD, and scientific computing. The scientific computing papers suggested that most people working on OOP in this area were using either C++, Smalltalk, or CLOS, the Common Lisp Object System. These scientific sessions made it glaringly clear that the ability to construct 3D computer models of objects and processes and to manipulate the models had by then become an essential tool of scientific research.
It was also clear that OOP solutions had some real challenges in efficiency and performance, as indicated by the fact that many systems dropped out to plain C code in critical sections, and by the sessions on the search for ways to speed-up garbage collection.
Sun was there, too, of course. These days, Scott McNealy is Sun Microsystems' point man for Infuriating People and Insulting Competitors. But in New Orleans that fall, it was Bill Joy saying that he didn't consider traditional data-processing professionals a market for OOP because they wouldn't understand it—and adding that, to be fair, he'd say the same about most C programmers.
Some of the chief issues pertaining to pushing the state of the art that came up at the conference were persistent objects, parallelism, agents, and reflection. There are many kinds of software agents, but one particular kind was on people's minds at the conference. Several talks dealt with developing agents to represent the user—or programmer or maybe the program—in searching for objects in some future world of sharable, reusable software components spread among widely distributed systems. Still something of a dream, but a little closer to reality today, maybe.
During one of the panel discussions, C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup said that anyone claiming that object-oriented programming will bring about bug-free software was probably spending evenings in the French Quarter guessing where people got their shoes.
I guess he ran into that guy, too.
The online community—and this is one of those cases where that expression is not an oxymoron—responded quickly and in many ways to hurricane Katrina. Among those responses were some creative applications of map-based mashups, including visual plots of Craigslist refugee housing locations and maps showing information about affected locations in New Orleans. Links to blog topics are often ephemeral, but http://googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/ is at least a starting point for reading about mashups and for tracking down some of these clever and useful hacks.
DDJ