Register now for Lang.NET Symposium 2009

We’re now accepting registrations and talk proposals for the 2009 Lang.NET Symposium, which will be held on the Microsoft campus April 14th-16th.

For those who aren’t familiar with this event, the Lang.NET Symposium is an opportunity for programming language designers and researchers from industry and academia to get together and basically geek out for two and a half days. And it’s not just Microsoft language wonks like Anders Hejlsberg or platform wonks like Don Box. For example, last year we had Dan Ingalls from Sun, Gilad Bracha from Cadence, John Rose from OpenJDK and Wez Furlong from the PHP Project among many others.

If you’re curious about the kind of talks we typically have at Lang.NET, the talks from 2006 and 2008 are available online. 

I’ve attended both previous Lang.NET Symposiums and spoke at last year’s event, but this will be my first as a part of the team driving the event itself. We’ve expanded a little this year, though we’re still a small conference so the signal-to-noise ratio should still be very high. We barely fit in the Platform Lab last year, so we moved this year’s event to Microsoft Research’s sweet new building #99.

This year, we’re very excited to be joined at the hip with Chris Sells’ DSL Developers Conference. Those guys over in CSD are working on some cool language stuff of their own, so it just made sense to hold the two events in the same space, one right after the other. Note, registration for each event is separate. You’re welcome to attend both – we’d love it if you did - just make sure you register for both.

As in the past, there is no cost to attend Lang.NET. You get yourself here and find place to stay and we’ll take care of the content, meals and beers in the evening. Just make sure you let us know you’re coming and what, if anything, you’re interested in getting up and talking about by registering at the Lang.NET Symposium website.

The Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups of Language Conferences

It’s been about 11 months since the last Lang.NET Symposium and we’ve been working on next year’s version. But then we discovered that we’re not the only ones inside Microsoft thinking about having a language conference. A couple of meetings later, and we’ve decided to combine them, which will assuredly lead to side conversations like this:

DSL DevCon Attendee: Hey, you got your compiler in my DSL!

Lang.NET Attendee: Hey, you got your DSL in my compiler!

[They sample the combined content]

Both Attendees: Mmmm, two great conferences that work well together!

Well, maybe not. But seriously, it should be a great combined conference.

However, there are some logistics things we need to work out, like how many days should the combined conference run? We figure the “right” answer to these questions depends on the likely overlap between the two conferences. Frankly, we don’t know what the overlap will be so we decided to simply, you know, ask.

If you are interested in attending Lang.NET, the DSL DevCon, or both next year, please head over to Chris Sells blog and make your voice heard.