[Edinburgh-pm] Mark Keating - conference post festival

[Andrew Smith]

Following our discussion of ideas at The Stockbridge Tap on Saturday
evening,My thoughts  are that these events  should be promoted as
inexpensive social/professional  events where  people who need to
understand the implications of new and emerging technologies can update
themselves  without spending hours tediously surfing  stuff on the
Internet by providing streams focussed on specific topics, such as
where Perl has moved to from the widely used 5.8 and CPAN, to Parrot and
Perl 6. Functional programming: What its about,Haskell,OCAML,F#,
Enterprise systems, Linux,OpenSolaris,MySQL,Apache.

My thoughts are that it could be aimed at graduates, who need to move on
from COBOL and FORTRAN. On the train to visit my Mother in Aberdour two
weeks ago, I spoke to a girl with a PhD from Lisbon who was on her way
to a cell modelling summer school in Dundee where the implementation
language was FORTRAN.

As Mark thought of the conference being after the Fringe, for
accommodation reasons, and maybe to catch parents dropping their loved
ones off at one of our fine Scottish Universities, we could widen our
possible attendees.

So hold it in the week following the end of the official
festival/fringe, and call it the "Edinburgh Computer Festival", like the
Book Festival, and Jazz Festival. People like Oracle,Microsoft,IBM,
might like to be sponsors.  Speakers could be drawn from Alumni, as well
as those in and around Edinburgh, even Dundee on how to run a video
games company.
Glasgow is known worldwide for GHC, so maybe Simon Peyton-Jones on
working at Microsoft Research,Cambridge on the F# team.

-- 
Andrew Smith B.Sc(Hons), MBA
14 Inverleith Place 
Edinburgh
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