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JAOO History part IV – A New Hope
By Aino Vonge Corry | September 28, 2008
A long time ago in a small country far far away… JAOO 2000 was the fourth JAOO conference, and back then, Microsoft was not involved.
J2EE was on the top of hype curve. Ruby was the new hope. Kent Beck appeared at the door in a blue collar outfit and was denied access for his keynote on Fred Taylor, Making Software, and Conversation.
The fall of 2000 was also when the IT bubble had just burst, but perhaps we didn’t quite realize it yet. At any rate, we already had “dot com” speakers invited, … and so Experiences with Java in a California dot com was in the programme.
Also at JAOO 2000 was a keynote by the late Kristen Nygaard on: Object Orientation – Past, Present and Future. A Personal View. If he was still here today, he would be likely to still argue that, really, nothing new has been invented since Simula. Which may well be true. (But some things does not have to change).
Bjarne Stroustrup and Betrand Meyer were both at the conference, which was a bit scary since they had been bashing each other with comments like: “There are only two things wrong with C++: The initial concept and the implementation.” -Bertrand Meyer, and “I prefer to have as little as possible to do with Bertrand Meyer” – Bjarne Stroustrup.
At any rate, Bjarne did an excellent job on the “hangover keynote” tuesday morning, as well as being the tour guide on the bus ride to the speaker’s dinner.
And last, but not least, A New Hope. JAOO 2000 featured the first JAOO talk on Ruby: An Introduction to Ruby by Andrew Hunt & David Thomas, as well as one of their first introductions to “Being Pragmatic”.
