seafood

Report on Sunday 24 August 2003

We arrived in Uppsala at about 9:00am after a two hour flight from Frankfurt airport and a half hour bus trip. Mark said it was a relief that the German air stewards and stewardesses didn't have big grins permanently plastered on their faces like the Singapore Airlines crew. I tended to agree. The breakfast was of a very good quality.

Uppsala is a beautiful town. I must restrain myself from describing it as little as well, for it is apparently the fourth largest city in Sweden, although I'm not entirely certain of the validity of this claim. We spent the afternoon looking at the cathedral (which is in the background on the PLI website), the castle and the University grounds.

In the afternoon we sat by the river with our takeaway coffees and talked both inanities and occasionally something of substance. The river seemed to be a real Sunday meeting place. Beautiful girl after beautiful girl walked by us and sat down either on another park bench or on the grass. The girls are indeed very pretty here. Perhaps we will get to talk to some of them this week. I sincerely hope so. Oh, and did I mention that the chicks are gorgeous?

In the evening I attended the reception for PLI. The first person I saw was Philip Walder. As much as I detest idolatry it was hard not to be awed for a moment. Soon after, Richard Bird entered the room. He wrote the second book I learnt functional programming from. He doesn't even know me but he is one of the principle reasons I live in Sydney now and am at this conference.

We made our way upstairs and I continued to see names of researchers I knew: Olin Shivers, Colin Runciman, Tim Sheard, Benjamin Pierce (who writes excellently) and also the names of other youngsters in the Haskell community such as Ian Lynagh. I've been wanting to meet Ian Lynagh for quite some time since he is doing almost exactly the same thing as me. Ian Lynagh was with a small group of other people I had only vaguely heard of: Shae Erisson, Ganesh Simalpalam, Isaac Jones, someone called Jan, a guy from Australia called Fergus.

And few of them looked anything like you would expect them to. Ian Lynagh seems quite confident online but was very shy in real life. Nonetheless, once you got him talking his confidence returned. He knows what he is talking about. The reception was rather short and we decided to all go for dinner and a drink. Both were expensive, but it's not worth going into exact details.

Two people at the table really made an impression on me: Shae and Jan. Shae was a self-taught programmer that had just happened to stumble across Haskell on his journeys. But it was remarkable how much he knew and all because he just loved computers and programming languages so much. I have great respect for a person like that. Jan worked for Sun and just seemed to be on the pulse of so many important new areas. And he could describe himself most eloquently. Incidentally, both of them were from the US, but Shae lived in some place 800km to the north of Uppsala.

I was suitably blown away and wished silently to myself that computers had has much inherent interest to me as they did for these guys. In fact, I wish anything non-trivial had as much inherent interest for me.

We returned quite late to the hotel and who should we find sitting in the hotel foyer but Simon Peyton Jones, the closest thing we have to a mega-celebrity at PLI. But I'm sure he'd hate the fact that people thought of him like that. Simon knew Jan and they shook hands. I stood dumbly by wondering whether to introduce myself or not. Of course I should have. Despite my mind telling me not to be intimidated or awed, I was, and this delayed a natural introduction.