JAOO - Day 4
This is day 4 at JAOO, which for me was the track “Back to the Future” hosted by the Practical Programmer Dave Thomas. The core idea of this track was to show up some concepts of “old” or not-so-mainstream programming languages, if they worked out the way they were supposed to, and if not, why not (was it because it was just a miserable concept or did some environmental factors prevent it from succeeding).
The first talk was another one by Guy Steele, this time on the history of Scheme (and a little LISP lesson) - “WOW!” again. It was followed by a talk on Haskell by Erik Meijer, a talk on Colored Petri Nets (an extension to the Petri Net model) and a talk about SIMULA and BETA.
The great final of the conference (the next two days are “only” tutorials) was a panel discussion about what will programming be in 2016, with Guy Steele, Ole Lehrmann Madsen, Steve Vinoski, Kevlin Henney and Erik Meijer, hosted by Dave Thomas.
The key points were that programming languages will have to provide better abstractions (especially for concurrency), DSLs will take an important role (as a special kind of abstraction), current main-stream languages will evolve (and/or die - be serious, who really thinks that he’ll be doing Java until he retires? On the other hand, as someone noted, there is so much Java code around, some people may have the (questionable) “opportunity” to maintain Java legacy code for the rest of their lives) and of course new languages will step on the scene (or take it over).
That was it for day 4. Picked up something to eat (a salmon sandwich after which I felt a little strange - hope in my case the salmon had nothing to do with salmonella), got the bus (yes!) and enjoyed two beers in the hotel (there go another 14 Euro).