OSCON Wrapup

The last two days of OSCON were good.

I got to hear Rob Pike talk about the Go language. Rob is a legend in software and Go is a cool language. In some ways Go is more like C or C++ in that it's compiled to machine code with no VM. But unlike C++ it compiles extremely fast. For what he called a party trick he showed it compiling every time he typed a character - and it kept up. It has features I miss in Java like pointers (but safe) and values on the stack (not always allocated). It also has "goroutines" - lightweight threads like coroutines. But its attractions aren't quite sufficient to tempt me away from Java. They don't even have a Windows version yet, let alone all the support libraries and frameworks that Java has.

I also got to hear another legend, Walter Bright, talk about his D language. I used Walter's C and C++ compilers for many years. D also has some very interesting features. Andrei Alexandrescu of Modern C++ Design fame is now working on D and has written The D Programming Language book.

One feature D has that is sorely missing from other languages is the ability to declare functions as "pure" (ie. no side effects) and have the compiler verify it. This (not lambdas) is the key to functional programming. And yet languages like Scala that claim to support functional programming don't have this.

I also went to a talk by Tim Bray whose blog I read. He was working at Sun but moved to Google after the Oracle buyout. His talk was on concurrency. He was very pro Erlang and Clojure but didn't mention Scala. When asked about it he said he thought the Scala language was too big. It does have a sophisticated type system, but the actual syntax is quite simple - smaller than Java. Scala's Actor implementation has been criticized but it's been improved in 2.8 and there are alternatives like Akka.