Language trendspotting at JAOO

Surveying the talks this year at JAOO, it is hard not to notice that nobody is getting too excited about either Java or C# anymore.

Ruby of course had a full track to itself on monday, and a track named "Enterprise Application Frameworks" on Wednesday was also pretty much Ruby/Rails dominated.

On the other hand, other languages were in the limelight too. We had a great introductory presentation on Erlang by Joe Armstrong, one of the principal inventors of the language. Erlang is the old-new contestant for the title of "right answer to concurrency challenge", and it really looks like it solves the challenge correctly for a fair ammount of use cases I can think of. Basically, whenever you can afford a share-nothing message passing architecture.

We also had a presentation of Scala. Scala must be my favorite language for about two years now even if I didn't write anything in it yet :-). You just got to love all the modern amenities in it that are missing from Java: type inference, very good syntax for map and list literals, closures, a really polished generics implementation (it allows contravariance, by golly!), plus assorted functional programming goodies, not the least of them being Haskell-style datatypes. Oh, and it is static and compiles to a plain Java .class, creating a very low (virtually nonexistent) entry barrier for gradual introduction into your existing Java code.

Oh, and people are talking about JavaScript as well :-)

Glenn Vanderburg gave a talk titled "The Overlooked Power of JavaScript", which was exactly what it said. The language had quite an injustice done to it because of its unfortunate name choosing -- as we know and as Glenn pointed it out correctly, it is not related to Java at all, its ancestry comes from Scheme and NewtonScript (useless trivia: I actually wrote a commercial application for Newton in NewtonScript back in 1996).

JavaScript is an incredibly powerful language if you can get rid of the preconception that you need to handle it as you'd handle Java. Once you get past that and actually understand how things work in it, you can develop some mightily beautiful code in JavaScript, as the extreme dynamism of the language allows you refactorings simply not possible in more constrained languages. You can end up with some very tight internal DSLs. And I'm not talking only about code to run in a web browser -- I'm talking about applications running on desktop or on a web server.

To demonstrate the power of the language even further, there was a presentation of Flapjax on JAOO this year. Flapjax feels like a language, but in reality it is "just" a JavaScript library, but one that allows you to program your browser-run client applications in an event driven manner, plus supporting reactive evaluation (think self-recalculating cells in Excel) when events change values. "Event" in Flapjax can be almost anything -- a tick of a timer, a click of a mouse, asynchronous completion of a HTTP request, and so on. You can concisely express your program in terms of reactions to such events, and also always preserve consistent internal state of all variables thanks to its self-recalculations, all with fairly intuitive syntax. That's quite a something from "just a library" in JavaScript :-) Flapjax was covered on LtU as well about a year ago.

So, all-in-all, language diversity is again in fashion. Developers seem to finally recognize that a language is just a part of their toolbox, and that you need to choose the right tool for the right job. Of course, I know that the same developers usually need to also convince their managers about this point of view, but fortunately this seems like it'll become easier with language diversity now being an accepted trend at respected conferences.