OOPSLA: Pre-Hype Edition

As you may have heard by now, I'm headed to Montreal tomorrow for this year's OOSPLA conference. I am pretty excited. I'm going as a student volunteer, and plan to see and do a lot. I thought I'd put up a list of talks, tutorials and keynotes that I'm planning on seeing or think I should see.

Here's the run-down:

Tutorials: Tutorials are usually hands-on sessions about a particular technology; they teach you how to actually go about using all these fancy tools that come up in the technical talks, and usually consist of a bunch of demos.

• Introduction to Concurrent Programming in Java - Even though I have written concurrent applications in Java before, this seems like a good tutorial to experience, if only to give me background for my research.
• The Scala Experience; Programming with Functional Objects - Scala is a pretty neat little research language that interoperates with Java, and has FP-like features. I would like to know more about it.
• Despite the great name, I will not be attending Totally Awesome Computing: Python as a General-Purpose Object-Oriented Programming Language.

Keynotes: Keynote speakers are usually pretty well established in the field, and get to talk about whatever they want. This is usually either some kind of retrospective ("back in my day, we only had 128k of main memory!") or free-form talks on the speaker's most recent interest, which may or may not be of publication quality. These are often the most entertaining talks of any conference, but the lowest on technical content.

• Second-Life: The World's Biggest Programming Environment - Jim Purbrick and Mark Lentczner talk about their massively-multiplayer online game/programming world.
• 50 in 50 - Guy Steel, of Java fame, talks about languages, where we've come and where we are going.
• Collaboration and Telecollaboration in Design - Fred Brooks talks about something... He's the sort of guy you go see no matter what he's talking about. The same could probably be said for David Parnas, who is also speaking, but I'm not quite as excited about seeing him talk.

Technical Talks: Actual presentations of research papers, these talks constitute the primary purpose of the conference.

• The JastAdd Extensible Java Compiler - After my experiences with Polyglot, I'd like to see if someone can do it better.
• Transactions with Isolation and Cooperation - While I'm not usually too interested in Transactional Memory papers that discuss how we can get I/O to work inside them, since this is the only TM paper of the conference I figured I'd probably better check it out.
• Modular Typestate Checking for Aliased Objects - Gotta see my boy KevDog give his talk.
• Lost in Translation: Formalizing Proposed Extensions to C# - Could be pretty interesting, actually. Those guys from MSR Cambridge seem to know their stuff.

What about you? Going to OOPSLA? What are you excited about seeing? Don't care at all?