This post originated from an RSS feed registered with Ruby Buzz by Obie Fernandez. Original Post: Live From JAOO - Future of Programming Panel Feed Title: Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?) Feed URL: http://jroller.com/obie/feed/entries/rss Feed Description: Obie Fernandez talks about life as a technologist, mostly as ramblings about software development and consulting. Nowadays it's pretty much all about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Latest Ruby Buzz Posts Latest Ruby Buzz Posts by Obie Fernandez Latest Posts From Obie On Rails (Has It Been 9 Years Already?)

I just wrapped up the What Makes Ruby Roll? track, which had the honor of hosting today at the JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark. We had a great turnout for the track and lots of excitement in the material presented. I'm going to ask permission to make PDF's for all the talks available here (stay tuned for that).

Before I say anything else, I have to say that this is one of the best conferences I've ever attended and I do plan to return in the future whether it's sponsored or not. (I'm not alone in feeling that way. According to Martin Fowler, JAOO is the only conference that he will pay his own registration fee and travel costs to attend, so he must have been really bummed to miss it at the last minute.)

Now I'm sitting in the end-of-day panel: "How will we be programming in 2016?" hosted by Dave Thomas (the original Dave Thomas, not PragDave). The panel is fielding a bunch of interesting questions from the audience and just tackled a couple of Ruby-related questions:

• Will (the) Ruby (community) in 2016 look and feel like Java in 2006?
• How can Ruby avoid the same fate as Smalltalk?

That first one was mine, hehehe!

Kevlin Henney said...

Someone will have rewritten it by then. Yes, will succeed where Smalltalk failed because it's not bound up in the smalltalk environment (you can open up Ruby files in Notepad). Also, do not underestimate how important a 'normal' if statement is. The biggest problem with Smalltalk is Smalltalkers.

Erik Meijer said...

Hopefully they'll get closures right and hopefully they'll discover type inference.

Dave Thomas said...

As long as the people who have big checks are running on the CLR and JVM Ruby will have to crossover to those platforms to succeed. Business and economics were the downfall of Smalltalk, not natural selection. The "arrogance of the smalltalk communities sealed the lid".

Steve Vinoski said...

A new vm is needed (for performance reasons). I don't think Ruby will look like Java in 10 years, because that's the point. I do think that type inference will make it's way in.

So there you have it, the expert panel opinion :) about Ruby 10 years from now. I'll post more interesting news from JAOO as time permits.