Channel 9 - Entries tagged with JAOO2008

Josh Holmes and Glenn Vanderburg: Dynamic Languages and Unit Testing

Charles — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 18:16:00 GMT

JAOO 2008 coverage continues with Ruby expert and Relevance consultant Glenn Vanderurg sits down with UX Architect Josh Holmes to discuss dynamic languages and the importance of unit testing. With dynamic typing you can imagine that creating solid unit tests is of prime importance (of course, this is the case for statically-typed language composition as well...). Why are unit tests so important in the context of writing applications with dynamic languages? Tune in.

By the way, Josh actually records this interview for his podcast show while I film it for Channel 9. So, you get to watch an audio podcast in the making. Of course, being that I am me I do get a few questions in! Thanks Josh and Glenn for letting me crash (well, film) your party!

Enjoy.

Jeffrey Snover, Martin Fowler and Neil Ford: Domain Specific Languages

Charles — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 14:30:00 GMT

JAOO 2008 coverage continues with a discussion covering domain specific languages with the great Martin Fowler, Chief Scientist at ThoughtWorks, Neil Ford, Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughWorks and PowerShell creator Jeffery Snover, Partner Architect at Microsoft. Martin is a world leader in the design and implementation of DSLs, which are highly specilaized languages aimed at solving particular sets of problems (unlike general purpose programming languages which are, well, general purpose in nature). PowerShell is a DSL. Or is it? Tune in.

Enjoy!

Erik Meijer, Dave Thomas and Pratap Lakshman: Perspectives on JavaScript and Language Design

Charles — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 10:51:00 GMT

JavaScript is a language that appears to have a long lifespan given its ubiquity on the web. It pretty much powers the client-side in-page execution of hundreds of millions of web pages. As a language, well, it's cool and strange at the same time. It's not evolved much over the years and is the topic of hot debate in the halls of the web standards committee. At any rate, a few people who know a thing or two about dynamic languages joined me in a conversation to address JavaScript and dynamic languages for the web, generally. The great Dave Thomas and fundamentalist functional languages high priest Erik Meijer sit down with Microsoft JScript Program Manager Pratap Lakshman and
myself to converse on JavaScript the language and virtual machine. Of course, as you can imagine, the conversation winds effortlesssly into various geeky tangents.

This is the second year I've been lucky enough to take part in the cross-platform software engineering conference
JAOO. Like last year, I was very fortunate to get to sit down with a few key players in the programming languages design field and watch several technical presentations that span the industry and problems we face as software developers. One of the truly great things about JAOO is that it is not a product-focused conference: it's about programming first and foremost and enables the sharing of perspectives and ideas among the world's best and brightest programming minds. As you can imagine, I, like many technical types here at Microsoft, am a huge fan of JAOO. Thank you Trifork!!!

Enjoy!

Anders Hejlsberg and Guy Steele: Concurrency and Language Design

Charles — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 13:27:00 GMT

This is the second year I've been lucky enough to take part in the cross-platform software engineering conference JAOO. Like last year, I was very fortunate to get to sit down with a few key players in the programming languages design field and watch several technical presentations that span the industry and problems we face as software developers. One of the truly great things about JAOO is that it is not a product-focused conference: it's about programming first and foremost and enables the sharing of perspectives and ideas among the world's best and brightest programming minds. As you can imagine, I, like many technical types here at Microsoft, am a huge fan of JAOO. Thank you Trifork!!!

In this conversation Microsoft Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of C# Anders Hejlsberg sits down with programming language design legend and computer scientist Guy Steele (creator of Scheme and expert in several languages ranging from LISP to Java). I think Guy is one of the smartest people I've ever met.

The topic of conversation is the elephant in the modern general purpose programmer's living room: Concurrency. With today's widely-used general purpose languages like C++, Java, C#, VB, Ruby etc it's hard to express parallelism in productive ways. Anders et al are working on both language enhancements to C# and VB.NET and BCL support (Parallel Extensions to .NET for example). Today, Guy is working on a mathematical language (domain specific as opposed to general purpose) and runtime, Fortress, that is so concurrent it makes it hard for programmers to even write sequential code!

Listen in to two of the programming industry's most successful thinkers and get a sense of their perspectives on the future of general purpose programming languages now that Concurrency and Parallelism are entering the development status quo.

Enjoy. More JAOO coverage to come. You can watch Anders' keynote on language futures here.