Sam Aaron, Joe Armstrong – Keynote: Distributed Jamming with Sonic Pi and Erlang

I like the idea of teaching distributed programming using music. I imagine some people are more auditory than visual.

Also like that Joe is still experimenting and coming up with outrageous stuff like "Instead of a process playing all the notes, spawn a process for each note and make it play that note and then stop".

It seems like a silly idea, but what he's getting at is with the ability to create independent concurrent building blocks you can start to think about problems in completely a different way. Quite often that models your problem space the closest, and then there is less impedance mismatch between your problem space the implementation.

For example you start with adding items to a shopping cart, and instead of worrying about business logic, you're now stuck debugging locks, threads, futures and promises, etc. At the end of the process you see that there are maybe 10 lines which describe the actual business logic but there are 1000 lines managing the impedance mismatch.

What a fun duo – great presentation overall. I love the way in which they glue different software together in ways that were never intended to get some awesome results.

There's something really satisfying about hearing that Moog play the first note driven by Sonic Pi.

Recently saw this dj live at Java1! Pretty amazing