Posts Tagged ‘programminglanguages’
[NDCOslo2024] Decades in the Machine: Meaning and Purpose in Technology – David Whitney
As circuits chronicle careers spanning scores, David Whitney, Director of Architecture at New Day and a prolific purveyor of programming tomes, confronts the crossroads of craft and chronology. A confessed creator of code and children’s chronicles, David delves into the dialectic of drudgery and delight, navigating the nebulous nexus of necessity and narrative in tech’s turbulent tapestry. His homily, heartfelt and humorous, harvests hard-won harmonies for enduring in an ephemeral enterprise.
David divulges dread: a talk trepidation-tinged, yet tendered to temper existential echoes. He heralds the hustle’s hollowness—monetary machinations versus meaningful makings—imploring identities intact amid instability. From fledgling forays to seasoned sojourns, David’s dispatch distills decades: delight in doing, despite detours.
Identity in the Interface: Crafting Careers Amid Chaos
Tech’s tumult tests tenacity: layoffs loom, languages lapse, yet purpose persists. David decries the drift—coding’s call versus climbing’s cachet—urging anchors in avocations: open-source odysseys, personal projects that pulse with passion.
He honors the hustle’s hybrid: salaried sustenance sustains side quests, where whimsy weaves worth. David’s dictum: diversify delights—write, teach, tinker—to transmute tenure into tapestry, resilient against redundancies.
Harmony in the Hustle: Balancing Billable with Beloved
The eternal equipoise: paid pursuits versus private passions. David dissects dilemmas—overtime’s overreach, burnout’s brink—beseeching boundaries: billable by day, beloved by dusk. His heuristic: harvest joy in journeyman jobs, channeling competence to causes cherished.
Mentorship mirrors meaning: guiding greenhorns gleans gratification, reciprocity in retrospectives. David’s dawn: embrace evolution—roles recede, relevance renews through relentless reinvention.
Optimism’s Odyssey: Growing Through the Grind
David’s denouement: optimism as ordinance. Persevere with patience—code’s camaraderie conquers crises, colleagues’ kindness kindles kinship. His litany: listen to users, laugh in logs, love the labor—error messages as endearments, PRs as partnerships.
His poem’s plea: prioritize presence—headphones in hives, grace for novices, green tickets for givers. In machines’ maw, meaning manifests in making—mindful, magnanimous, merry.
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[NDCOslo2024] Smarter, Not Harder: Scaling Without Burning Out in an Always-More Landscape – Marion Løken
Amid the relentless crescendo of expectations—ever-expanding portfolios, dwindling headcounts—Marion Løken, a product manager at FINN.no, chronicles a odyssey of astute adaptation. As FINN merged with Nordic kin like Blocket and DBA, Marion’s lean cadre of four developers and a designer scaled offerings from Norwegian dealer portals to pan-Nordic private and financial forays, all while safeguarding sanity. Her manifesto: intelligence over intensity, leveraging toolchains and toolboxes to transmute toil into triumph, ensuring expansion exhilarates rather than exhausts.
Marion’s narrative unfolds against FINN’s tectonic shift: from solitary insight apps to embedded analytics across platforms, reinventing for diverse demographics. This “more with less” maelstrom, she concedes, could crush spirits, yet a smarter ethos—component curation, documentation dynamism—drove delight. By embracing mainstream stacks like Kotlin and Spring, augmented by FINN’s Podium toggles, her team doubled revenues annually, sans burnout’s bite.
Cultivating Resilience: Buffers Against Overload
Stress, Marion posits, stems from workload, control, and reward imbalances. Her buffers: processes fortify all facets—planning preempts panic, frequent releases reclaim rhythm. Culture cascades calm: transparent retrospectives temper tensions, fostering feedback loops that affirm agency.
Tools tame tasks: reusable libraries liberate from reinvention, Swagger’s specs streamline specs. Marion’s metric: fun’s stability, tracked longitudinally, underscores sustainability’s success. Her heuristic: under duress, deliberate—rethink routines, not redouble efforts.
Toolbox Transformation: From Niche to Nimble
FINN’s evolution eschewed esoterica for ubiquity: Kotlin supplanted Kotlin Multiplatform, OpenAPI supplanted bespoke bindings. Marion marvels at Podium’s prowess—feature flags flipping functionalities fleetly—enabling A/B artistry without architectural upheaval. Documentation, once dormant, danced dynamically via auto-generated APIs, accelerating assimilation for newcomers.
This pivot propelled progress: a pricing tool, inherited and iterated, burgeoned from parity to prowess, yielding fiscal fruits. Marion’s mantra: mainstream multiplicity multiplies might, marrying maturity with maneuverability.
Embedding Efficiency: Innovation Amid Integration
Embedding insights into journeys demanded deft design: component catalogs curbed custom code, promoting parity across portals. Marion’s lean legion—four coders, one crafter—conquered complexity through collaboration, cross-pollinating with Nordic nests.
Her horizon: stress as signal, prompting smarter strides. By buffering buffers, teams transcend thresholds, turning “always more” into ample achievement.
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[KotlinConf2019] KotlinConf 2019 Keynote: People, Ideas, and Software in the Kotlin Ecosystem with Andrey Breslav
The opening keynote of KotlinConf 2019, delivered by Andrey Breslav, the then Lead Language Designer for Kotlin at JetBrains, set an inspiring tone for the conference. Addressing a packed room of 1,700 attendees, with many more watching online, Andrey articulated a vision of Kotlin that extends beyond mere syntax and features, emphasizing it as an ecosystem built upon three pillars: people, ideas, and software. His presentation underscored the collaborative spirit that fuels Kotlin’s growth and the continuous feedback loop that shapes its evolution. The official Kotlin language website, central to this ecosystem, is kotlinlang.org.
Andrey Breslav began by reflecting on Kotlin’s journey and its burgeoning community. He highlighted that the success and adoption of Kotlin are deeply intertwined with the people who use it, contribute to it, and advocate for it. This “people-first” perspective was a recurring theme, as he stressed that Kotlin is designed to bring developers together, fostering a common way of working and shared values. The vibrant interactions at KotlinConf itself, with developers from around the world sharing experiences and knowledge, served as a living testament to this community-centric approach.
The Power of Ideas and Continuous Improvement
A core tenet of Kotlin’s development philosophy, as outlined by Andrey Breslav, is the importance of ideas and the relentless pursuit of improvement. He emphasized that the Kotlin team at JetBrains actively seeks and values feedback from the developer community. This feedback loop is critical, whether it comes through direct communication, bug reports, feature requests, or even passively through anonymized usage statistics collected by JetBrains’ IDEs. These statistics, he explained, help the team understand how Kotlin is used in real-world scenarios, identify pain points (like slow code completion in specific environments), and prioritize areas for enhancement.
This data-informed approach allows the Kotlin team to make more effective decisions about the language’s future direction. Andrey encouraged attendees to participate in this feedback process, assuring them that their input, no matter how small, contributes to making Kotlin better for everyone. He cited examples where community feedback directly influenced language features and tooling improvements, reinforcing the idea that Kotlin’s evolution is a collaborative effort. This commitment to listening and adapting ensures that Kotlin remains a pragmatic and powerful tool that addresses the real-world needs of developers.
Software as a Collaborative Endeavor
The third pillar, software, encompasses not only the Kotlin language itself but also the rich ecosystem of libraries, tools, and frameworks that surround it. Andrey Breslav highlighted the importance of this broader ecosystem in making Kotlin a productive and enjoyable language to work with. He acknowledged the contributions of the community in building these resources, from open-source libraries to educational materials and tutorials.
Furthermore, Andrey spoke about JetBrains’ ongoing efforts to enhance the Kotlin tooling, including the compiler and IDE support, to improve performance, stability, and developer experience. He touched upon initiatives aimed at making Kotlin more versatile, enabling its use across various platforms—JVM, Android, JavaScript, Native—and for different types of applications, from server-side systems to mobile apps and web frontends. The keynote celebrated the milestones achieved, such as the growing adoption of Kotlin Multiplatform, while also looking ahead to future challenges and opportunities. Andrey concluded by reiterating that every form of participation, from writing code and tutorials to sharing experiences and even simple social media interactions, adds value to the Kotlin community and contributes to its collective success.
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[ScalaDaysNewYork2016] Scala’s Road Ahead: Shaping the Future of a Versatile Language
Scala, a language renowned for blending functional and object-oriented programming, stands at a pivotal juncture as outlined by its creator, Martin Odersky, in his keynote at Scala Days New York 2016. Martin’s address explored Scala’s unique identity, recent developments like Scala 2.12 and the Scala Center, and the experimental Dotty compiler, offering a vision for the language’s evolution over the next five years. This talk underscored Scala’s commitment to balancing simplicity, power, and theoretical rigor while addressing community needs.
Scala’s Recent Milestones
Martin began by reflecting on Scala’s steady growth, evidenced by increasing job postings and Google Trends for Scala tutorials. The establishment of the Scala Center marks a significant milestone, providing a hub for community collaboration with support from industry leaders like Lightbend and Goldman Sachs. Additionally, Scala 2.12, set for release in mid-2016, optimizes for Java 8, leveraging lambdas and default methods to produce more compact and faster code. This release, with 33 new features and contributions from 65 committers, reflects Scala’s vibrant community and commitment to progress.
The Scala Center: Fostering Community Collaboration
The Scala Center, as Martin described, serves as a steward for Scala, focusing on projects that benefit the entire community. By coordinating contributions and fostering industrial partnerships, it aims to streamline development and ensure Scala’s longevity. While Martin deferred detailed discussion to Heather Miller’s keynote, he emphasized the center’s role in unifying efforts to enhance Scala’s ecosystem, making it a cornerstone for future growth.
Dotty: A New Foundation for Scala
Central to Martin’s vision is Dotty, a new Scala compiler built on the Dependent Object Types (DOT) calculus. This theoretical foundation, proven sound after an eight-year effort, provides a robust basis for evaluating new language features. Dotty, with a leaner codebase of 45,000 lines compared to the current compiler’s 75,000, offers faster compilation and simplifies the language’s internals by encoding complex features like type parameters into a minimal subset. This approach enhances confidence in language evolution, allowing developers to experiment with new constructs without compromising stability.
Evolving Scala’s Libraries
Looking beyond Scala 2.12, Martin outlined plans for Scala 2.13, focusing on revamping the standard library, particularly collections. Inspired by Spark’s lazy evaluation and pair datasets, Scala aims to simplify collections while maintaining compatibility. Proposals include splitting the library into a core module, containing essentials like collections, and a platform module for additional functionalities like JSON handling. This modular approach would enable dynamic updates and broader community contributions, addressing the challenges of maintaining a monolithic library.
Addressing Language Complexity
Martin acknowledged Scala’s reputation for complexity, particularly with features like implicits, which, while powerful, can lead to unexpected behavior if misused. To mitigate this, he proposed style guidelines, such as the principle of least power, encouraging developers to use the simplest constructs necessary. Additionally, he suggested enforcing rules for implicit conversions, limiting them to packages containing the source or target types to reduce surprises. These measures aim to balance Scala’s flexibility with usability, ensuring it remains approachable.
Future Innovations: Simplifying and Strengthening Scala
Martin’s vision for Scala includes several forward-looking features. Implicit function types will reduce boilerplate by abstracting over implicit parameters, while effect systems will treat side effects like exceptions as capabilities, enhancing type safety. Nullable types, modeled as union types, address Scala’s null-related issues, aligning it with modern languages like Kotlin. Generic programming improvements, inspired by libraries like Shapeless, aim to eliminate tuple limitations, and better records will support data engines like Spark. These innovations, grounded in Dotty’s foundations, promise a more robust and intuitive Scala.