THE LACK THEREOF

Various musings of Brock Wilcox (@awwaiid)

Dynamic Language Conference Brainstorm

Created 2012-06-17 / Edited 2012-11-14

Idea: A regional one/two day two-track conference on software development in dynamic languages. Perhaps even an annual / 6mo event?

Submit the same talks that you would submit to your regional or national language-specific conference ... only here, instead of the speaker before and after you using the same language, they might be using something completely different. But ultimately very similar problems get solved, systems get built, concepts get used.

Names:

  • DCDU - DC Dynamic United
  • DDC - Dynamic DC
  • DCD - DC Dynamic
  • eval (ēval)
  • late bound

What makes a language dynamic?

  • No/little compilation
  • Eval :)
  • Late binding
  • ...

Sample dynamic languages/Technologies:

  • Clojure
  • Javascript
  • Nodejs
  • PHP
  • Perl
  • Python
  • Ruby

Aspects:

  • Open source communities
  • Source-code centric
    ** Aka developer centric
  • Celebrate similarities
  • Share new ideas
  • Libraries, applications, platforms
  • Where do you shine, and how can others steal or make it better
  • Stand on each other's shoulders

Example overlapping tech:

  • pydoc, perldoc, rdoc
  • WSGI, Rack, PSGI
  • DBIx::Class, ActiveRecord
  • Rails, Django, Catalyst, Cake
  • CPAN, Gems, pipi, npm
  • Handlebars, TemplateToolkit
  • Pygame, SDL
  • Numpy, PDL
  • Mechanize
  • pypy, rubinius, jpython, jruby, ironpython, ironruby, perlito

We don't have a common runtime -- you can't just call a perl sub from a python one. Even within a language you have this issue -- you can't call arbitrary ruby from jruby. Yet we do have in common a set of overlapping problems to be solved and ideas for how to solve them. Let's get together to share (steal!) even more of these ideas.

There are interesting design decisions made between one project and the next within a language, and you get a whole other view when comparing projects from a variety of languages.

Other Conferences

  • Dynamic Languages Conference 2011 (UK) - "The DLC is a cross-language event aimed at Open Source Dynamic Languages, we hope to bring together all the languages in an open forum to discuss and present the manner in which these languages approach and solve tasks at the cutting edge of development technology" Organized by Mark Keating
  • Dynamic Languages Symposium (DLS) - Tucson, Arizona, USA, October 22, 2012
    Co-located with SPLASH 2012. 6th annual ACM symposium. Very notable lack of "perl" in their list of dynamic languages :(
  • Dynamic Languages Conference (Stockholm) - cancelled due to lack of particpants

Dynamic Language and Other (local) Groups