I'm blogging from CodeMash in beautiful Sandusky, Ohio. The temperature outside is below freezing, but we're warm and dry inside -- or warm and wet at the indoor waterpark.

My favorite sessions so far:

Bridging Worlds: Making Java and .NET play well together

Speaker: Ted Neward

Ted has obviously well versed in both Java and .NET and has seen the good and the bad in each. The talk discussed different ways to achieve programming language detante (my word) by identifying specific communication strategies.

The World is Dynamic

Speaker: Bruce Eckel (Keynote)

From this uninspiring title came some provocative thoughts. He reported that one study found that the chance that a programmer's initial "best guess" estimate as to how long a task would take is zero percent chance. And the most productive programmer is one that is given no schedule deadlines.

Domain-Specific Languages and Their Role in the Evolution of the Programming Paradigm

Speaker: Neal Ford (Keynote)

Obviously, Neal and Bruce have different styles of titling their talks.... Neal gave an insightful "step back" look at programming languages, how they evolved from each other and how today's languages carry forward baggage (ie C# and Java have zero-indexers, curly braces, and semi-colons because they evolved from C and C++) and how newer languages can achive improved readability and productivity by introducing radically new syntax.

All the speakers say they'll be posting links to their talks from the Codmash site, but I don't see any links yet.