Monday, September 29, 2008

JAOO Observations

Here are my day 1 observations from the JAOO conference.

Languages evolve slowly. Despite an 100000 increase in storage capacity, 10000 increase in memory and 1000 increase in processing capacity in the last 10 years, programming languages look and feel the same as 10 years ago. The only real difference is that the language has become only a small part of what you need to learn. The major part is now in the libraries, which did grow by 1000 increase.
For new languages, it becomes harder to have your own infrastructure. That is why many are written on the JVM or the CLR.

If you are writing a social website, you must look at open social. The open social specification has been handed over to a foundation. It seems to have become really easy to incorporate it into your social website.

A long discussion on the beautiful (yep, that´s really the best word) presentation ´Designed as designer´ gave the following somewhat disappointing results:

  • ´Designed as designer´, or by substitution ´Work of art as designer´ is the wrong title. It is true that great works of art (including software projects) write themselves after the first draft, but the real topic of the presentation was that all works of art are produced by groups of people, not single individuals.
  • However, since we already operate in the group modus, our lives are not changed at all.