English translation of http://d.hatena.ne.jp/squeaker/20131101#p1

There was a co-located workshop called FOOL, or Foundation of Object-Oriented Languages (http://fool2013.cs.brown.edu/). It was a gathering of mainly static-type theorists. I snuck into it when I saw David Ungar and Gilad Bracha chatting there, so I anticipated something would happen. Kim Bruce was about to give his keynote on the history of last 20 years of FOOL.

After Kim Bruce' talk, Dave Ungar asked a question (I paraphrase): "What is the best thing that came out from this community that contributed to the real world, beyond academics, in last 20 years?" (Well, he clearly was trying to be usual Dave Ungar and be provocative). Answers from audience were "GJ", "F-bounded polymorphism, the idea of contravariance of inherited methods, and killing Eiffel and shut Bertrand Meyer up; but not much more. Dave was unconvinced (he would not be convinced with these answers from the beginning anyway). When one answer mentioned that static-typing is good for documentation, Dave then suddenly quoted my talk; He said (to the effect) that "there was a fantastic talk by a young fellow in the morning, who turned a few hundreds of thousands (sic, I corrected it to hundreds of millions) lines of code into 20,000 lines of clear code. That could be a better documentation!" It is flattering but I really did not want to be involved in a controversy with type theorists!