Another spectacular PLDI

PLDI this year was amazing. I was surprised at the quality of the talks in general, and I especially enjoyed the "hallway track" conversations that surrounded them. Edinburgh was a great setting, too—there was plenty to explore before and after the conference.

Unsurprisingly, I was left with lots of opinions about the details of organizing a conference, from the significant to the mundane:

- I'm really happy that PLDI has gotten on the "lightning session" (teaser talk) bandwagon. Especially for multi-tracked conferences, it's really critical to judge which talks are likely to appeal.

- I'm less enthusiastic about poster sessions. I like having the opportunity to chat in more depth with presenters, but I don't think posters themselves are particularly useful—the in-person conversation is way more important, people generally don't seem to look at the visual aids much, and they take a lot of time to make in proportion to how useful they are. The sticker-based whisky sweepstakes were a nice touch at PLDI, though.

- As I think others have posted here, I wished many times for places to sit down during lunch. Stand-up lunches are space-efficient but exhausting.

I've also posed a blog-form summary of the paper I presented at PLDI, which I'll avoid duplicating here.