Speakers
- Clifford Berg
- David Bock
- Scott Davis
- Rick DeNatale
- Esther Derby
- Robert Fischer
- Neal Ford
- Chad Fowler
- Andrew Glover
- Stuart Halloway
- David Hussman
- Yehuda Katz
- Rich Kilmer
- Carl Lerche
- Matthew McCullough
- Joe O'Brien
- Andrea O. K. Wright
- Russ Olsen
- Bob Payne
- Christopher Redinger
- Johanna Rothman
- Brian Sam-Bodden
- Ken Sipe
- Brian Sletten
- Kevin Smith
- Venkat Subramaniam
- Nathaniel Talbott
- Laurie Williams
Rick DeNatale
Object Oriented Practitioner
Some highlights from my 32 year career at IBM include: the development of the initial proof of concept for IBM VisualAge/Smalltalk, a distributed implementation of the Smalltalk
language, work on VisualAge Micro Edition for Java (the precursor to Eclipse), serving as a founding member and secretary of
the X3J20 Smalltalk committee, and appearances in the
early decades of OOPSLA.
I've had the opportunity to know, work, and interact with many of those who laid the groundwork for what we do with Ruby and how we do it.
My sporadic thoughts, mostly about the Ruby language and related topics can be found at my blog. http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com
Presentations
The Fall and Rise of Dynamic Programming Languages
A war is being waged between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance. The imperial forces are laboring tirelessly to stamp out such dangerous ideas as late-binding, and automatic memory management.
Based on long experience, such ideas are known to cause severe performance problems at best, and to bring down the Empire with errors at worst.
The year, 2008 Ruby vs. Java*, or ca 1990 Smalltalk vs. C++, or ...
The languages change, but the arguments remain. After a period in the shadows, dynamic languages have been on the rise again. Ruby has been at the forefront of this resurgence, with older dynamic languages tagging along. At the same time, hard-learned lessons from the implementation of these earlier languages are starting to have an influence on implementation of the newer ones. Witness the buzz in the Ruby community about "repurposeing" projects such as MagLev.
This talk will explore the history of the dynamic vs. static debate, and attempt to bring to light the reasons why many of the arguments against dynamic languages are based on things which just don't matter if the language isn't static.
I'll also have a few things to say about why things like MagLev make sense.