JAOO Brisbane, Day 2

A highlight of JAAO Brisbane Day 2 was standing around talking with Erik Meijer, Don Syme, Joe Albahari and some Workingmouse guys. The conversation comparing Java with C# and the JVM with the CLR was a bit of fun. Catching up with Dave Thomas was also good.

The program I followed for the day was:

Keynote: Clean Code, Robert C. Martin
The audience generally seemed to enjoy this presentation. I found the main points to lack justification (no the jury is not in on TDD) and the attempted emotional guilt trip by associating the points with professionalism unhelpful.

Building RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws, Steve Vinoski
Steve talked about Erlang briefly and little more about Yaws. Most of the talk was about REST.

GData, Google, the Cloud, and You, Gregor Hohpe
Two interesting demos. Firstly the Google Mashup Editor and then the Google App Engine.

Language Orientated Programming with F#, Don Syme
There weren't many people in this session, which turned out to be great because Don made it more informal. Most of the session was centered around using F# for parallel and asynchronous tasks. The implementation is done using Monads (but don't tell anyone :-)). Don happily answered questions from people new to functional programming and others comparing with Haskell. He knows his stuff.

Multi-language Programming, Steve Vinoski
I wasn't in much of this session, but while I was there Steve talked about the Blub Paradox, languages suited for XML processing (Scala got a mention) and Concurrency. The problem of shared mutable state got raised again (amazing how often it pops up) and then Steve talked about Erlang using similar material to his previous session.

Overall, I enjoyed the conference and am very appreciative that Dave, Trifork, the speakers and everyone else involved brought JAOO to Brisbane.