It's in the nature of BoFs (Birds of a Feather sessions) to be frustrating. No sooner does the ice break than the proctor comes in and announces that the last bus to the hotels leaves in 10 minutes. Oh well...

The "Alternate Programming Languages" BoF gathered a great group, but I'm afraid that 60 minutes was patently unworthy of the stories to tell and questions to ask. After going around and getting a sense of the group, we talked mostly about two questions, one predictable ("Does the CLR inhibit dynamic languages?") and one less obvious, but ultimately perhaps more important: "Does the Base Class Library taint languages?" Or more generally, if you accept that a class library implies patterns and programming models, is this terribly jarring to people programming with different patterns and programming models?

I don't think we reached a consensus and I'd be suspicious of whether the group was a representative sample of the user community anyway! In the group, people mostly voiced a pragmatic acceptance that you might have to deal with different programming models and it's not a big deal. I'm not sure I agree, but I certainly enjoyed the conversation.