Steve Vinoski's Blog

I recently returned from giving two talks at each of the Brisbane and Sydney JAOO conferences. JAOO has long been my favorite conference, and even though this was the first time JAOO was held in Australia, my understanding is that overall it was quite a success. There were a couple hundred attendees in each city, and I heard a number of attendees echo something along the lines of “we really need developer conferences like this that aren’t marketing and aren’t academic.” That’s precisely why I like JAOO so much — almost all of the JAOO speakers are practitioners themselves, so as a developer you get a lot of well-grounded useful info rather than product pitches or unproven research.

My talks were “Building RESTful Services with Erlang and Yaws” and “Multilanguage Programming.” For first-time talks both went OK, but they could have been better. The biggest problem with both was that I already had too many slides for each one for an hour but when I got there I learned that a scheduling mix-up had reduced the presentation time slots to only 45 minutes, which then meant I had way too many slides for each talk. The first talk tries to cover a lot of ground, for example, and it’s hard to remove any of it and still have it make sense. Oh well. I warned the attendees up front about the problem, and since I got reasonable reviews for both talks I hope that means I left the attendees with some useful info.

There’s talk in the blogosphere of a strong revival in interest in programming languages, and I’d have to say there’s definitely something to that notion because I didn’t expect so many would be interested in the multilanguage programming talk. I guess I expected to encounter some defensive dyed-in-the-wool “X” programmers, where “X” often seems to be Java, who would just argue that multilanguage programming is a bad idea, but there were none. Instead I was encouraged by the number of developers who came to the talk and seemed truly interested in the idea of learning and using multiple languages in order to do their jobs in the best possible way.

Anyway, I strongly recommend that you go to JAOO Aarhus if you can.

Next up: Erlang eXchange in London, which I also strongly recommend. Overall it looks like a very strong program, and I’m really looking forward not only to giving my “Enterprise Integration” keynote there, but better yet getting to meet more folks in the Erlang community in person. I hope I’ll see you there.

I finally got around to watching and listening to Bob Ippolito‘s “Exploring Erlang” video, and I don’t know of any more thorough hour-long introduction to the language than this one. If you’re interested in Erlang but are too busy or too lazy to read Joe Armstrong’s great book or any of the many papers and articles that describe Erlang, then Bob’s talk is for you.

A few interesting points for me:

• In a few places Bob mentions that while he finds Erlang syntax unusual it’s really no big deal, and you quickly get used to it. I can verify that he’s absolutely right. A lot of people seem to get really hung up on this issue; if you’re one of them, all I can say is that your concerns are very greatly exaggerated.
• Along the lines of the previous point, one of the questions Bob takes after his presentation is from a gentleman who says that his technical lead refuses to use Erlang — in a telephony application, no less — and that his tech lead rolled his own stuff for concurrency and interprocess communication. Hmm, I wonder if that technical leader’s initials are “N.I.H.” It would be interesting to see how well his solution could hold up in the environments in which Erlang has already well proven itself. Given all the attempts I’ve seen over my career at solving such things, many of them made by people who mistakenly think it’s not that difficult to get right, my guess is “not that well.”
• Bob mentioned that he finds Erlang to be a very small and thus easily learnable language. He’s absolutely right about that, too; I wish I could count the number of times I’ve said the exact same thing in conversation, in presentations, and in writing. Many people who come from Java or C++ or other general-purpose languages assume that languages need to be huge to be useful, so they assume that small languages must be toys, and they also assume any “real” language requires years to learn. How incredibly wrong they are.
• Bob keeps the whole discussion grounded by explaining how Erlang saves him and his team time and money. In case it’s not clear, he’s talking about actual time and actual money. He explains that he can serve millions of web requests per day from just a single machine (though he naturally uses more than one for redundancy and reliability), for example, and by mentioning the small size of his team — I think he said 8? — he hints at the productivity that Erlang affords. My experiences are, again, quite similar.

Coincidentally I also watched Jim Weirich‘s “Shaving with Occam” presentation from the MountainWest RubyConf 2008 held at the end of March, and was pleasantly surprised to find that he devoted a good portion of his talk to Erlang. He mentioned how it was like Lisp in the sense that it has a small core, simple rules for manipulating that core, and powerful abstractions for building new things from the simple rules and small core. Yet, I shouldn’t be surprised. I don’t know Jim at all, but judging from the dates he mentions in his talk I think his career spans around 30 years. It’s also pretty clear that he’s had broad and deep experience with many technologies during that time. From what I’ve seen, people like Jim who have an incredibly deep first-hand understanding of the utility and importance of simplicity, brevity, and powerful abstractions in software development seem to have no problem whatsoever quickly seeing and comprehending the immense value of Erlang.

You’re still not exploring Erlang? What are you waiting for?

I just returned home from QCon London, and its excellence exceeded my expectations. As usual, the quality of speakers QCon attracts (just like JAOO) is outstanding, and they cover a very wide variety of topics.

Kent Beck‘s keynote was excellent. It was about developer responsibility, developer integrity, and the relationships developers have with those around them (here’s a good summary). Extremely insightful, not unexpectedly of course, and covering important topics that are unfortunately often taboo among technical folk.

It’s been awhile since I spent any quality time with Kent, but we did manage to sneak off to a back room at the speaker party on Thursday evening and get 20 minutes or so of conversation in, which is better than nothing. Given that the first two to drop in were Jim Webber and Joe Armstrong, though, neither of us minded the extra company. Generally, though, I think I could easily spend a couple solid days talking to Kent about development issues.

I spoke in Stefan Tilkov‘s track on Thursday, and I thought it went OK. Stefan has already provided detailed notes on each talk (except his own, which was really good) on his blog, so I won’t bother with repeating any of that. I got to meet Paul Fremantle in person for the first time, which was nice, though I have to say I remain puzzled by his “REST is too hard for the average developer” claim he made in his talk, since it definitely doesn’t match my recent experiences with watching others learn it and apply it. I’ve heard Sanjiva say the same thing before as well, so I wonder if it’s just something they keep telling themselves, hoping it will come true if they repeat it enough. ;-)

On Friday I thoroughly enjoyed Simon Peyton-Jones‘s Haskell talk and Joe Armstrong‘s Erlang talk. Both were excellent speakers, and both talks ventured into areas that I’m sure many of the attendees were not familiar with, so I’m sure most everyone who listened learned a lot. Thankfully there were no “Haskell vs. Erlang” wars, but that’s not surprising given that Simon and Joe are friends, plus they know that that argument serves neither language.

The best part of the week, though, was getting to meet and hang out with Joe and other Erlang folk. Joe’s really an excellent guy. He’s quite energetic, and his brain just doesn’t stop. He’s curious about a lot of technical things beyond Erlang, and I found discussions with him to be full of interesting questions and insights. Given the fact that I work with Erlang quite a lot these days, my hope going in was simply that I’d get a chance to just say hi to him, but I turned out to be lucky enough to spend many hours with him over the course of the conference. I also met Francesco Cesarini, a well-known and long-time Erlang consultant, whom I’m sure has probably forgotten more Erlang than I’ve learned so far. I also met Alexis Richardson, who works on RabbitMQ, the right way to implement AMQP. Francesco graciously invited me to speak at the Erlang Exchange this summer, so I’ll be seeing them all again before too long to talk even more about what’s quickly become one of my favorite programming languages.

Congrats to Floyd, Kresten, and the whole QCon team for putting on yet another excellent conference. I’m looking forward to JAOO Australia (in both Brisbane and Sydney) next!

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.

I returned home from QCon San Francisco last night. In the SOA track, it was most excellent to finally get to meet Patrick Logan, Stefan Tilkov, Pete Lacey, Jim Webber, Stu Charlton (thanks again for the Dew, Stu!), and Mike Herrick in person, as well as to get to meet up again with Sanjiva Weerawarana, Glen Daniels, and Dan Diephouse. All in all the SOA/REST track was highly informative, with solid presentations through the whole day. Pete’s was especially cool due to the demo he gave of the extreme flexibility and integrability of REST-oriented solutions. It was also reasonably fun, given how much the attendees got into it with their questions, and especially due to Jim’s presentation at the end in which he mixed some serious technical chops with very funny one-liners popping out every second or third sentence.

My talk, “REST Eye for the SOA Guy” (title taken from here), went reasonably well. The only time it didn’t flow as smoothly as I would have liked was when some semi-anti-REST folk started questioning my assertions about specialized interfaces inhibiting scalability, and wondering whether REST just pushes all the coupling problems to the data. I felt like I was being pulled backwards in time by 5 years to the old W3C Web Services Architecture Working Group meetings, where very little was ever accomplished due to arguments like those. I’ll have more to say on those topics in some near-future blog postings.

An interesting thought struck me as the track progressed: in my experience it seems that most SOA/WS proponents who argue against REST on technical merits have never actually tried to build any RESTful applications. Many of their objections seem to be heavily based on emotional reactions, or based on conclusions reached only by blowing issues out of proportion (for example, I felt that many of the points in Sanjiva’s talk fell into this category). So it led me to wonder about how many, if any, dyed-in-the-wool WS advocates ever seriously, honestly, and fairly looked at REST, actually tried it, but then decided it didn’t work and so willingly chose to go back to WS. I don’t want to count those who had to go back to WS only to integrate with something else already implemented using WS, because that doesn’t fit the “willingly” part. (For example, I recently had to write a client to access a SOAP service, and I was definitely not in the “willingly” camp because the service was way more complicated than it needed to be, only because of SOAP.) I personally know of nobody who has ditched REST for WS like this, but if you have, or if you know of someone who has, I’d love to hear the whole tale, so feel free to leave it in a comment.

The conference itself was much like JAOO, which is not surprising given its JAOO roots. It was smaller, of course, given that this was the first QCon held in the U.S. And just like JAOO, there were times where I wanted to be in multiple places at the same time to see two or three different talks all scheduled concurrently. For example, I very much would have liked to sit all day in the Thursday “Architecture Quality” track, but couldn’t since it ran parallel to the track I was in.

In short, if you didn’t go to QCon, you missed a great conference. Stefan, thanks again for inviting me.