JAX 2007: Polyglot Programming (Neal Ford, ThoughtWorks)

Bridge building as metaphor for sw. Jack W. Reeves "What is sw design?"

Design: Sourcecode itself. Manufacturing incredibly cheap.

Design small parts, then bigger. Our design tool: Java. C/C++-origins.

Stupid Java Tricks: static block. 6 ways to initialize sthg. in Java.

Enum example.

Inner class inherits

List<String> s = new ArrayList<String>()

{

{ add("hi"); //etc.

Justin Gehtland.

Language entropy – languages tend to become more complex.

Java language is the design, Java platform the manufacture.

Jaskell, Scala – Functional languages – e.g. automatically thread-safe

More declarative than imperative code.

Paul Graham, Hackers and Painters. Scale of the power of languages. LISP as the most powerful predecessor – no language that goes so far, Java only 4 features, Groovy 6 (?), Ruby 7

Ruby example… Calendar cal; cal.2.days.fromToday…

Testing is the rigor of SW dev.

KGs Summary:

The most inspiring and personally important session which I attended. Neal Ford made clear that following the test-first-approach (and testing in general) is more needed than type-safety. And even more needed than the IDE (or whatever) is the programming language as developer’s tool. But what the programmer most necessarily needs is – his brain. If he doesn’t think but just rely in the compiler warnings etc. there is no gain at all. As Neal Ford explained that FUD very often distracts from thinking, his recommendation is to evaluate, I think, every Java developer should take a mid-complex personal project and rewrite it in Ruby.

But I’m also sure, many won’t. This is caused in the fact that there are many programmers which have no "personal project" – they even haven’t any IDE installed at home.

To me it seems, the programming world is not only splitted into MS and non-MS programmers or those who use a plaintext editor and those who use a full-featured IDE, but also in those who want to be efficient (in the Pragmatic Programmer’s sense) and those who just want to stay where they are. There is a big "gap of passion" and IMHO, the less a developer is passionated about software development the more she/he’ll produce and consume FUD.

Addendum: On Neal Ford:

Homepage: http://www.nealford.com/

Blog: http://memeagora.blogspot.com/