altlang_eng

AltLangFest is a programming conference held yearly in Korea since 2005 where attendees exchange their knowledge and expertise in different programming languages. AltLangFest 2006, which was held at

Daemyung Resort, Hongcheon, September 1-3, was met with much fanfare by Korean programmers and all two hundred tickets were sold out in less than 24 hours. As expected from such hype, the conference was a remarkable success as recorded by over fifty blog articles attendees have posted.

'''''Alt''''' in ''AltLangFest'' means several different things. First, it represents the theme of the conference. AltLangFest is a programming conference on non-mainstream programming languages and non-mainstream usage of mainstream programming languages.

'''''Alt''''' also emphasizes the highly experimental way of organizing and running a programming conference. AltLangFest is a grass root conference entirely organized by volunteers. According to Kim Chang June, one of the leaders behind this effort, he and others have wanted to create a conference characterized by the attendee participation and not just by the formal sessions. As anyone who has attended AltLangFest this year can tell, this goal was fulfilled very successfully. The organizers have already begun talking about AltLangFest 2007 and it surely will be an even greater experience.

This year, the featured languages were Ruby, Haskell, Mathematica, Lisp, Smalltalk(Squeak), Ojbective-C, J, Java, Io, OCaml, Curl, Lua, Assembly, and Python. Tutorial sessions were held for each of these languages so that attendees can pick them up quickly and participate. However, the sessions weren't the main focus of the conference.

Attendees were strongly encouraged to pair up with one another to learn new programming languages. It was called "The Language Exchange" and it has proved to be a very effective way of learning new programming languages. Many attendees has raved about the experience.

A typical attendee has picked up three to five new programming languages during this three day event. This were further complemented by BOF/OST sessions where attendees met new people and discuss the various aspects of different programming languages. In addition to the featured languages listed above, Excel+VBA, Javascript, Flash Actionscript, and R were exchanged among the participants.

|| http://fs.tistory.com/attach/5274/1055747214.jpg ||

|| when the participants exchange languages they put a sticker on it to make a bingo (from

[http://hkjinlee.tistory.com/tag/%EB%8C%80%EC%95%88%EC%96%B8%EC%96%B4%EC%B6%95%EC%A0%9C

hkjinlee's blog])||

|| http://blog.zeropage.org/attach/4/1633748159.jpg ||

|| You see about 12 people sitting on the stage, each person representing his programming language community. The name of that session was "How would you do in your language?" Basically, the presenters do the panel discussion and debate with other programming language person, comparing the codes. ||

Some people, after the festival, gave testimonials such as "it was a life-changing event in my life". The festival made a deep impact and gave influences on many social events in IT fields and some other

fields in Korea.