[Grace-core] Pomona Colloquium & meetings

[James Noble]

Hi Kim & all 

> I gave a talk on Grace to the combined Claremont CS colloquium.  I've added the slides to the repository.  I had to skip the material on modules, but covered most everything else there.  It was a good audience with plenty of give and take.

sounds good!

>  It shouldn't have surprised, but the students were more rigid than faculty in thinking of a new language as a possibility.  

:-)

> I had a number of complaints about dropping null from the language - they didn't see the advantage as we still detect uninitialized variables.  I'll need to have a good example ready for such objections in the future.  One student also wanted to require that all variables be initialized on declaration.  I'll need another example ready to show why that can't always be done (at least not gracefully).

the doubly-linked list is the classic example...

> There was also some concern about when one would transition to an industrial strength language.  Personally I'd like to stick with Grace through most of data structures, perhaps transitioning in the last month of that course to another language.  As we develop courses/curricula we'll have to figure that out better.

indeed...

> As usual I'm not sure of our plans for this week.  I believe we are going ahead and staying with meeting on Monday at the usual time.  Yes?

as earlier: yes!  10:45 Tuesday NZ, 2:45 US...

> I've made my reservations for SPLASH.  I'm arriving in Tucson Sunday early afternoon and leaving Thursday at 3:10 p.m., arriving in Ontario at 6:11 p.m.  Michael and I will coordinate in Tucson so that I can either wait for him at the airport or pick him up later (It's not that far from my house).  I've lost track of whether or not Andrew is coming out on Monday/Tuesday after SPLASH.  Let's nail that down this week.
> 
> We should discuss the various presentation at SPLASH at our meeting on Monday.

I'd still like Michael to debrief on ELC/StrangeLoop, whether there's enough interest to do that online, I'm not sure

James