I attended JAOO in Århus this year – what a fantastic experience, this conference has a special atmosphere. Denmark is such a small country, you keep meeting old colleauges, classmates, bosses – whatever.
This years buzz was all about functional languages – we finally need to decide what to do with side effects. One possible solution is to have the language give clear, big warning signs.
This is the old semantics vs syntax discussion: Giving clear names, typesafety etc doesn’t help to achieve the big golden dream of (finally!) having reusable software components. What we need to agree is semantics – what does it do, not syntax – how to call it.
I was enchanted by Bill Verner, and his Scala talk, and I am really looking forward to his newcoming Scala book. A typesafe dynamic language that runs on the JVM – I am kind of convinced that this is exactly what we need. To bad the book isn’t coming out before the conference is over – I would have loved a signed copy.
I also enjoyed Michael Nygards talk “Failure comes in flavors” almost without breath – his rant about patterns and antipatterns when time comes to deploying and keeping our applications alive was full of cliff-hangers. Respect. If you ever have a chance to hear this man talk – and if uptime is of any importance to your next web-app – don’t miss him.
I also spent some time discussing lean/agile architecture with James Coplien and his gang. He is promoting DCI – data, contexts, interaction, which is a new paradigm in structuring your applications architecture. James wants us all to move us away from class-oriented programming to true object oriented programming. We spend a couple of hours hanging out, discussing how to translate his example into different programming languages. I myself tried to convince James that you can do it -in Java too. Sitting together, 5 people, around a table, we discovered how we all have been searching for the same answer. Magic of coincidence, or is it the world allready moving in a new direction?