On November 12 – 14th a few people in our group had the privileged of attending the NoFluffJustStuff conference in Minneapolis.
We picked up a lot of good information that will hopefully improve our project. In particular I was inspired by the Productive Programmer lectures by Neal Ford as well as the Domain Specific Language lecture. A big thrust of the conference was Agile development which is becoming just principles in good practice.
The other big points in the conference were Dynamic Languages and in particular Groovy had a big showing at the conference. I have been trying to pickup Groovy and am trying to make it work where we can. One shortcoming in the language so far is the terrible error messages that get produced when something happens in the bowels of the JVM.
Ted Neward gave a good keynote presentation on the power and popularity of VM languages (CRL and JVM) and the boost they are giving previously “academic” language features.
I am cheesed to check out Scala more especially when it picks up popularity and some backing. I think Groovy is a good place to start with dynamic languages on the JVM however and will start there. I already know Python fairly well but I don’t think Jython is a solid implementation currently. I hope it can catch up. I would like to see it skip right to Python 3.0 which is entering alpha stages.
Anyway we are presenting the NFJS conference for others in our department tomorrow. NFJS BMI Presentation is a link to the presentation.
