The speaker list for Lang.NEXT 2012 has been released, and I found myself trying to decide which speakers to go see. There are a lot of fine choices so I thought I had better get organized!

Here are the speakers I want to see because of a “personal” connections:

  • Andrei Alexandescu was my C++ hero for years as I dove deeper and deeper into the language and metaprogramming.
  • Martin Odersky created Scala and I loved Scala for a time.
  • Herb Sutter because I’ve read all his books and in doing so fooled myself into thinking C++ was a valid language. :-) Honestly, I really don’t care what other ridiculous features have been bolted onto C this year, but it would be fun to see him present.

And then there are those I want to see because of their notoriety:

  • Gilad Bracha because he just seems ridiculously smart and continues to invent new and interesting languages.
  • Erik Meijer because he is energetic and usually has something interesting to say.
  • Mads Torgersen for his C#ness. But really, do I need more C# knowledge. ;-)

Then there are the speakers I want to see because they sound fascinating:

  • Andrew Black says he understands OOP and mobile. I want to see if his ideas of OOP jive with my own.
  • Walter Bright seems to be a big compiler geek. Compilers are boring, but compiler geeks are not.
  • Kim Bruce he said OOP and Java in the same sentence, but I’ll forgive him for that since he sounds like a sincere smart one.
  • William Cook worked on AppleScript and more OOP.
  • Jeroen Frijters because kangaroo vouched for him and IKVM is cool.
  • Andy Gordon because his bio mentions machine learning and F#. Check, and check.
  • Robert Griesemer made Go and worked on the V8 engine. There must be some good stuff to learn from him.