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Trends at JAOO 2008
By vahagn | October 2, 2008
It is the 3rd day of the conference at JAOO 2008. I’ve been to a number of interesting talks; it is now interesting to summarize some of the trends among speakers and their topics.
Innovation in software, or the evolution of “doing the same things better”, seems to come from 2 sources: 1) programming language paradigms and 2) developer practices. Example of the first is the increasing use of functional languages and metaprogramming, nicely described here.
Examples of the second are refactoring practices, Agile methods, TDD, and the whole software as architecture view.
The first focuses on languages and their inherent capabilities, the second on people and their practices.
Presenters can be categorized, as well; the first group usually dresses casually, the second one formally.
When the first group speaks about software, they include a lot of code samples; the second one base their slides on slogans, formulas, and principles. There’s something inherently corporate about the way the latter group views software.
The first group uses slides with a generous use of graphics and attractive fonts, while being sparing with text (this doesn’t include code samples); indeed, in certain individual cases representatives of this group can be suspected of having studied Presentation Zen. The second mainly uses several lines of lines of text (black) on a white-background slide.
The first group are mostly Mac people, the other group mainly PC people.
If you can recognize yourself in one of these categories and feel I am overly generalizing, my apologies to you.
June 24th, 2010 at 10:02 pm
Lol!
And right on, too. I think we have a budding anthropologist on our hands…