Last year after RSNA, I had the opportunity to go to a very different conference.
The Lua community held a small workshop in Reston, Virginia on the 29th-30th of November. A whole group of people from many different industries came together to discuss how they were using Lua.
While I tried to dress appropriately, I ended up overdressing for the first day. I switched to jeans and sneakers for the next day. Too much time spent going to healthcare IT conferences!
There were a lot of interesting talks. Wikipedia is apparently planning on using Lua as an alternative to wiki markup. I thought that was interesting – since I personally have found most template languages/systems do seem to end up being half-baked languages. Why not just use a nice clean scripting language like JavaScript or Lua in the first place?
There was a neat home automation system, a robot called Crazy Ivan, a project to make something like node.js for Lua. VeriSign apparently does some dynamic DNS work with Lua because it is so fast.
I was surprised to learn that I was one of the few people to have actually seen Mike Pall, the elusive genius behind the LuaJIT engine. This is an open source project that we proudly sponsor.
I gave a talk at the conference about the Iguana translator IDE and various design decisions that went into it. It was very well received. The talk was recorded and I more or less forgot about it. Last week, Joanna on Art’s team found it on YouTube, and reminded me of it.
So I am sharing it here. I think it is helpful in explaining some of the thinking behind the translator. I touched on a of couple themes I see often in healthcare integration which may resonate with what other people observe.