Geeking out
I'm too young for this. A bunch of industry-leading language developers and university professors talking about dynamic languages with enough acronyms and language names to share a stick at! I have an interest in the progress of IronPython, so the title "Scripting and Dynamic Languages in the CLR" attracted my attention, especially seeing that Jim Hugunin was one of the panelists. They also had key members (perhaps leaders) of the Monad and VB projects from Microsoft, and a non-MS guy developing a language called Boo.
Questions were varied but there was this one statement that is worth remembering: "Computer Science is the one area where you can predict the future - just look back 20 years" - the theory being that 20 years ago men had these ideas, but only now do we have the horse-power to actually implement them. After all, most of the "cool new features" that we have spent the conference talking about are really old concepts that we are only now implementing, because the industry and technological capabilities are ripe for them. In reality, isn't it true at some level that nothing is really new - in many aspects we just keep repeating history on various levels.