Strange Loop 2009 – Day 1
A new developer conference has started in St Louis this year named Strange Loop. Normally I don’t go to developer conferences because they are either in a different country or on the coasts. This one was close by in St Louis, MO. And from the quality of speakers and diverse sessions I predict next years conference will sell out very quickly unless they increase the capacity. Below are my overall topics/themes I took away from the conference and some interesting points from each talk I witnessed along with links to the speaker’s site and slide show if available.
Day two
Strange Loop Thoughts Overall
- open source, open source, open source
- every talk envolved open source. The FUD around open source is finally withering away.
- DRY constant theme
- Mobile development is upon us and will be for maybe ever
- Scala, Clojure, Groovy are HOT languages on the JVM
- Great conference that covered many relevant topics
- All the talks were technical, no boring management oriented sales pitches
Functional Ruby – Dean Wampler
- http://deanwampler.com/
- Link to slide show
- I atteneded this talk because I’m interested in the functional programming line of thought. And I don’t get to see much ruby code.
- Recommends learning a functiona programming language: Scala, Hascal, Cojure
- Multiprocessor systems are making it more important to use threads. Threads and synchronizaton is hard to get right. So functional languages that have immutable objects/values are easier because immutable objects/values don’t require synchronization.
- Try to avoid a bloated domain objects that have numerous properties to fullfill multiple requirements for different use cases. Have smaller objects for seperate uses.
Polyglot Programming – Dean Wampler
- Link to slide show
- polyglot programming: using more than one programming language. Not like using CSS, JS. But like using Groovy and Java or Groovy and Clojure.
- Dean thinks that Scala could become very popular in the future
- Hybrid object and functional language
- Multiple cpus is driving the need for functional languages
- Mentioned the famous quote: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exuper
Griffon (Swing just got fun again) – James Williams
- http://jameswilliams.be/blog/entry/index
- http://groovy.codehaus.org/Griffon
- Mentioned that the swring application framework is dead
- Griffon is the unofficial grails for the desktop
- It really did looks rails like from the project layout to the build process
- Suggested Groovy In Action for anyone that wanted to earn Groovy
Future of Java – Bob Lee
- http://crazybob.org
- Writes his talks in Java. I’m serious. Here is the SVN repo for his talks
- Talked about how/why he wanted better resource management in Java.
- Said he searched the JDK and found that 74 out of 110 the JDK has leaks for a certain IO functionality.
- Talked about his work on JSR-330 dependency injection in JDK
- @Inject annotation
- New quicksort that was developed for Android JVM (Harmony)
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October 24, 2009 | Filed Under java, open source
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2 Responses to “Strange Loop 2009 – Day 1”
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I think above in the Griffon talk you meant to say the “SWING Application Framework is dead”, not the “Spring App F/W”.
Nice write-up. Thanks for coming!
Thx for pointing that out. Big thanks for setting up the conference Alex. I look forward to next year.