InfoQ Interview

February 26th, 2008  |  Published in commentary, conferences, CORBA, distributed systems, dynamic languages, erlang, HTTP, interview, productivity, REST  |  3 Comments  |  Bookmark on Pinboard.in

When I spoke at QCon San Francisco last November, Stefan Tilkov interviewed me, and the video is now available on InfoQ.com.

We covered a range of topics: CORBA, dynamic languages, REST, distribution, concurrency, Erlang. Stefan asked some great questions, and I hope I gave some worthwhile answers. Thanks again, Stefan.

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  1. Edward says:

    February 27th, 2008 at 10:50 pm (#)

    Really nice interview! Congratulations.

    By the way, I think you should start pondering about the writing of a new book. It would be really nice if you could condense some years of experience as a middleware developer to the new generations.

    Best regards

  2. Marcos Oliveira says:

    February 28th, 2008 at 7:03 am (#)

    Steve,

    What a nice interview. The concept of languages being a toolbox should be mandatory for any serious developer, except for the one, and one only, language ones. These maybe are in the wrong career.

    Best Regards,
    Marcos

  3. Anthony Tarlano says:

    March 1st, 2008 at 12:00 pm (#)

    Steve,

    Your views in this interview are spot on..

    As you know, Dijkstra told us that the humble programmer always needs to “confine [themselves] to the design and implementation of intellectually manageable programs.” This means that the clever programmer will find the best tools to manage the problem and this includes programming languages and tools.

    As you know during the last 40 years we as an industry went through a cycle of the “one and only”, whether it be one editor, one programming language, one OS, one browser, one IDE or middleware platform. In each case the only answer to the “one and only” was the one that worked for the individual.

    So even though I personally use emacs, python, C#, no IDE, love the CLR, don’t really like Java, use Windows and Linux, find Forth and Erlang interesting, etc.. the humble programmer in me realizes that another very competent programmer may choose vi, ruby, VB, not know much about the CLR, love IDEs and Java, only run FreeBSD, etc.. and it’s okay. The fact is that in each case the alternative that they choose allows that individual programmer to reduce their intellectual effort.

    This is a lesson that every humble programmer should learn.

    Regards,

    Tony