{"id":1737,"date":"2015-07-06T19:38:12","date_gmt":"2015-07-06T18:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/?p=1737"},"modified":"2015-07-06T19:38:12","modified_gmt":"2015-07-06T18:38:12","slug":"polyconf2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jurecuhalev.com\/blog\/polyconf2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Notes from PolyConf 2015 – Conference for developers who code in multiple languages"},"content":{"rendered":"

As developer, I feel that I work inside my technology bubble. I keep using the same tools. Because of this, it takes a lot of effort to learn new development paradigms and languages.
\nPolyConf<\/a> was a small conference, less than 300 people in beautiful Poznan, Poland. The breadth of content, participants and organisation made it stand out.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve made some notes on the impressions, that the talks and discussion provided.<\/p>\n

Types and Immutable data structures.<\/h2>\n

Most of the talks were building on top of functional programming paradigms. There are clear benefit of that approach, as we move towards multi-core, distributed computing. I can’t wait to see some of these concept in upcoming Python 3 releases.<\/p>\n

In this regard, Facebook’s Flow<\/a> provides alternative to types in JavaScript. This has benefits over writing your code into TypeScript or ClojureScript.<\/p>\n

Language for Every Problem<\/h2>\n

As we\u2019ve seen in Python community – change is hard. That is why development is happening in new languages. Some decide to build whole ecosystem, while others compile to a common VM or language.<\/p>\n

Two of the presented languages – Crystal<\/a> and Elixir<\/a>, were both influenced by Ruby. I would like to understand, what is about Ruby syntax that makes it a good basis for language development.<\/p>\n

New languages also come with new frameworks. Phoenix for Elixir<\/a> is one of them. A scalable web framework, that is using streams to keep processes separated and get speed benefits.\u00a0A year ago, I would be skeptical about using new web framework. But with microservices and Single Page Apps, it looks like there is opportunity to experiment. We’ve offloaded most of the representation and business logic to clients.<\/p>\n

Lots of Practical Advice<\/h2>\n

One of the benefits of being a polyglot is so you can use official libraries. A lot of good things are happening on JVM stack that we can’t just ignore.<\/p>\n

Beware of defaults – they are usually not optimal for your use case.<\/p>\n

The main benefit if knowing lots of languages, is to be able to borrow different concepts. If you want to explore different concepts, consider:<\/p>\n