June 25, 2013
Alex Payne, CTO and Co-Founder of Breather, spoke at RICON East. His talk, “Nobody Ever Got Fired for Picking Java: Evaluating emerging programming languages for business-critical systems,” looks at how engineers have more programming languages to choose from than ever before. Thanks to mature runtimes like the JVM and CLR, and the prevalence of near-universal targets for cross-compilation like JavaScript, language development has accelerated dramatically. Additionally, modern languages can evolve from rough hobbyist projects into capable tools in a short period of time due to active open source communities.
His talk explores the landscape of new languages and provides a decision-making framework that can be used to narrow down language choices.
His slides are available below:
https://speakerdeck.com/al3x/nobody-ever-got-fired-for-picking-java
Alex, in addition to founding Breather, also organizes the annual Emerging Languages event, which will be held for the fourth time in September 2013 as part of the Strange Loop conference in St Louis, MO. He co-authored “Programming Scala” for O’Reilly and has spoken at conferences worldwide on using cutting-edge languages for real world work. Alex was previously CTO of online banking startup, Simple, and before that, Platform Lead and an Infrastructure Engineer at Twitter.
Tickets for RICON West (Oct. 29-30th in San Francisco) are now available.
