July 24, 2009 that was Day 5 of OSCON 2009 for me started with yet another talk by Gunnar Hellekson on using open source for building government projects. This was followed by very entertaining talk by Erik Meijer on “Fundamentalist Functional Programming”. He talked about side-effect free programming and how most functional languages are not pure. He briefly described Monads features of Haskell and how LINQ is influenced by them. Finally, there were keynotes by Karl Schroeder and Mark Surman, which were not very inspiring.
There were not a lot of sessions on last day of the OSCON, I decided to attend The HTML 5 Experiments to learn a bit on new HTML5 tags. Bruce Lawson showed how he implemented his blog using some of HTML5 tags such as header, footer, section, article, time, etc. He also mentioned canvas feature that was interesting but was difficult for people that require assistance technology. Finally, video tags won’t be available anytime soon due to a lot of proprietary decoders.
I then skipped next session and headed to Tech Museum, which is must see if you are visiting San Jose. I then headed to the airport and flew back to Seattle in the evening. Overall, I enjoyed OSCON 2009, I wished there were more talks on functional programming and was disappointed when haskell talk was cancelled. Also, I wish more talks were a bit more hands on like talks on CoucheDB that showed examples of how to use the system instead of just listing out features.