Hanging out at #javaone I've been at JavaOne 2009 for the past few days. Lots and lots of great information, and learning a lot. Many of the talks I've been attending have been about alternate languages that run on the JVM - JRuby, Scala, Groovy, jython. Many of these languages solve problems that are difficult to solve given the constraints of the Java language, or at least are difficult to solve elegantly. Some of the problems along these lines are concurrency, simplicity, ease-of-development, and relaxing the type system. They all end up being about developer productivity. I find lots of analogies to the debates about java vs C++ in the late 1990s. This is probably healthy. The same thing appears to be happening in the .NET world - there are a lot of languages that run on the .NET CLR, and they don't all look like C#. In fact, F# looks pretty neat.

I also wanted to post a link to a great summary of a session about concurrency gotchas in java.

I've been posting updates on Twitter, if you're interested in following along.

Labels: java javaone scala jruby ruby

  ¶ 6:08 PM