PolyConf 2015 – A multi-disciplinary conference for polyglot programmers
polyconf.com
polyconf.com
I'm sure even your golfer might be interested in attending a masterclass that only covered putting.
Put it this way: Is there a conference for professional basketball, baseball AND ice hockey players? I'm not even aware of anyone who managed to go pro in two of those, not to mention all three.
Most programmers have a preferred domain and language. Once you scale past a pet project and have a decently sized team, specializations start to occur, especially as the code base grows beyond what one person can hold in memory.
I'm reminded of the saying "jack of all trades, master of none".
I'd also argue that the skills needed for multilanguage competency as a programmer aren't as mutually exclusive as some of the physical traits needed for pro-level athletic talent.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Jackson [2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multi-sport_athletes
There are a handful of athletes that have played both pro football and baseball, Bo Jackson probably being the most famous.
Michael Jordan played pro Baseball and Basketball, but was never a good baseball player
Well, a particularly large hand:
If you are even narrower than "pro" and restrict it to just MLB and NFL, there are several dozen [0]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_who_played_in_...
Do you have different people in your team: one focused on nginx, one on bash, one on Python, one on PHP, and one on algo design?
> Most programmers have a preferred domain and language.
A preferred domain perhaps. But a preferred language? That smells of sticking to one's (tightly drawn) comfort zone.
I prefer to speak English. Yes, "language is arbitrary", but pointing that out is kind of missing the point, isn't it?
Not to discredit your argument even a bit, but Michael Jordan (MJ23) had a short stunt with pro baseball away from basketball.
That was so easy man :)
Which is a more accurate analogy than a whole sport.
> Put it this way: Is there a conference for professional basketball, baseball AND ice hockey players? I'm not even aware of anyone who managed to go pro in two of those, not to mention all three.
Among athletes that have gone pro in more than one sport, baseball/basketball seems to be a not-unusual combination:
Michael Jordan is probably the best known example, but also Danny Ainge, Scott Burrell, Nathaniel Clifton, Dave Dubusschere, Cotton Nash, and Bill Sharman.
Hockey is a pretty rare combination with either baseball or basketball.
Programming languages are different. For one, they all run on the same hardware. For another, the basics of logic and such are the same. And for the coup de grace, we have the well-known acecdata that learning a language of a significantly different paradigm than your "main" language generally improves your ability to program in your "main" language, to the point where I and others routinely recommend to people that they learn (or implement!) other language paradigms as a routine, expected part of their programming career. Learning Haskell to the point you can effectively use it can and will improve your PHP.
In the programming field, I don't think you can be a master programmer without being a fairly effective polyglot, as a bare minimum requirement. That is, if someone claims to be a master but they only have fluency in one language, even if that language is C++ or something, I would not consider them a "programming" master, only a C++ master.
As a dumb example, when XMLHTTPREQUEST hit the streets, it was a paradigm shift in enterprise, but a pretty easy one for web developers to add to their toolbox. Years pass.... When everything became javascript, that was much harder, especially for the .Net folks who came from a VB6 background rather than a pure HTTP/TCP/CGI background. Lots of companies are still in infancy with adoption of modern front ends, mostly because their programmers are not polyglots and actively resist learning new things... and you can't just abandon hundreds of legacy apps through hiring better educated, modern web developers with the limited budget most companies have.
A few years ago we made a decision to shift from a .Net (+MSSQL+JQueryUI) stack to a Java stack, mostly for licensing cost avoidance after MS raised the price of SQL Server dramatically with 2012. More than three years later, >90% of our internal apps are still .Net and only a handful have been released on our new preferred stack (Java/PostgreSQL/Bootstrap/Angular) and probably only 10% of the programmers are competent enough to work independently using the new tooling.
This sad state is an area where there's a lot of naivete among young programmers and startups. The corporate world just doesn't work in remotely the same way. ... ironically, a lot of "progressive" corporations end up creating mini-Innovation teams internally with their best & brightest, who are told to "act like a startup" and end up basically creating 75% of all the new stuff ... until it requires an interface to a legacy system and the devs outside the team refuse to cooperate out of fear.
Oh, it's a mad, mad world.
I've been in exactly that situation, working on a small 'startup' team inside a large, traditional organisation. The friction between the 'old' and 'new' camps was heartbreaking.
This was after I'd moved on, but I'm led to believe that things have improved greatly since that change.
While I'm certainly stronger in one language I'd say it's quite normal to use at least 3 programming languages daily. As a Unix guy it's even more. If I just want to write a Python hello world I need to know some Python, some Bash, some Vimscript, some Terminal I/O. Many of my projects also have Makefiles, additional bash scripts (which includes SED and AWK besides Bash). Interaction with databases, APIs, JSON or XML or INI configs, HTML, etc is also common. And let's not forget that most systems that have grown over the years have a few DSLs to interact with their tools.
So before I finish my first coffee I've probably used 6 languages already on a typical work day. I think most coders in my company are fluent in at least 10 programming (&related) languages. And while our software development team is certainly better than my last gig I still hope it's not the top of what software dev teams can be.
And your most prevalent point is that company enforces some language usage. It's often not the same if you switch. So if you have more than 5 years you probably can increase the typical programming language fluency about 50%.
Also your example about switching stacks. Your first stack had .Net, C#, SQL, JS and JQuery. Now you at least sometimes also use Java, and whatever Bootstrap/Angular require.
I got fed up with this state of affairs a few years ago and stopped looking for .Net or Java developers and started looking for self-described hackers, assuming that would increase the odds that they had some passion for programming and could/would/had pick up whatever tools they needed for the job. It has worked well.
As an aside, though, especially in countries like India, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Bulgaria, Poland, and others which are low cost recipients of outsourcing dollars, "software factories" are common, and in places like this it absolutely is common for an individual programmer to literally spend their time all day, every day doing the same one type of thing. Imho, the higher the CMMI number, the worse this gets (the pinnacle is the "just write a function to pass this test. No, it doesn't matter what it's doing or what this software is for. Just pass the test.", where developers on the front line are plug & play cogs who don't even know what they're working on).
I would consider a polyglot as able to express a full domain of ideas in multiple languages. (For example, knowing latin for biology or religious recitation doesn't make you a normal polyglot, while being able to use it at the breakfast table does.)
So, only if you are one of the few who regularly enjoys the thrill of forcing SQL to do your general computations, would it count in my book towards making you a polyglot in the context of general purpose computing. Similarly, how you choose to use shells would determine whether they count and whether they are each distinct.
Back when I was learning, I had Timex 2068 Basic and Z80.
Then at technical school, each class had its own programming language.
Followed by CS degree, with loads of programming languages.
First job, TCL, C, C++, JavaScript, C#, Java, SQL dialects.
Every single job afterwards required proficiency in multiple languages, even JVM/.NET (interaction with OS, languages that target those runtimes).
Timex's Basic really only added a few extra commands (on err, stick, delete, free, reset and sound IIRC.) Everything else was identical.
However the demos for the sound chip were great.
The irony is that one of my Java friends told me that he could pick up any language on a need basis, and that I was ignorant for not knowing design patterns such as Factory, Visitor, Observer/Observable, etc.
That would have been... frightening.
Set a variable in one language and use it in another, work with multiple languages on the same page, including javascript, and run them all interactively.
Email me for more info.
I use LiveComment for same purposes.
I have a decent background in Prolog (hardly an expert) and know it's often a good tool for the job but often shy away from using it regardless.
I hope the "Erlang in multi-lingual systems" talk (all of them for that matter) will be available later :)
"Why should you learn to program Commodore 64 this year?" sounds like the exact kind of talk I'd enjoy.
Prices seem very fair and I love that a %age goes to CodeStarter.
(disclaimer: the author is my friend, but still highly recommended!)
I'm not knocking Poland, but it seems strange to have an English-language conference there and not offer anything in the way of explanation for the choice.
I mean, I'm sure there is a reasonable explanation (central location, picturesque setting, low costs, fits the ethos of a polyglot conference, offers the possibility of both a conference and a vacation) but I find it strange that the explanation isn't more visible.
Alternative, glib answer: because computing shouldn't be confined to the US, or I guess places like London in this case.
That may not always be so, and one day I might be giving my talks in Mandarin. But for now, this does not seem unusual.
What Poznan does have going for it is that it is the economic motor of a very large part of Poland.
I don't think we needed an example in order to understand "speaks more than his native language".
See here http://www.techrepublic.com/article/developers-are-calling-i... for instance
Or here http://radar.oreilly.com/2013/11/polyglot-programming-what-i...
Basically the big G is your friend?
Calling a Common Lisp function from your Rail project might not be the best solution to your problem all things considered even if the Ruby version of that function is both slower and less elegant than the CL version.
It doesn't come down to it: it was about economics all along. All these philosophies -- polyglot, more monoglot, etc. -- have costs. You can choose to ignore it sometimes by staunchly recommending one approach over another in generic settings. But the underlying costs are still there.
Anyone who advocates pure monoglot or always using the best tool is not being pragmatic. Decisions should be driven by cost/benefit and not religion.
But this "one" language would probably have the power to express its own EDSLs for different domains and problems (like Lisps). So in effect, maybe you could say it's many different languages in one. So why not just use many different programming languages instead of one extensible one...?
Because general purpose programming languages seem to end up feeling too monolithic when considering that they might only be used by you for that one thing. Consider two approaches: have one language that solves problems in domain A really well. Then you want to solve problems in domain B really well. But the first language is not suited for that. So you use a totally different language for that. Maybe it has its own interpreter/compiler/library and specification. Maybe you need to interoperate between these languages. What do you do? Inter-language communication seems to be in a sorry state, if the Unix philosophy of "strings anywhere" is the prevailing philosophy. I guess we're supposed to use Json now, perhaps? Corba is dead. I saw a thick old book about it where I work and didn't feel inspired.
Compare that to having a language where you can express domain B more clearly in the first language. It turns out that there was some friction and ceremony with expressing domain B in the first language, but being able to express this as as EDSL -- maybe by using something like macros -- gets you 90-100% of the benefits of using a totally new language. Additionally, there is less underlying complexity -- you have one language derived from the other using constructs from the original language. And ideally you can inspect and unfold this implementation; go through a few layers of macros, perhaps. Contrast this with having two wholly separate languages with their own runtimes, libraries and what have you.
This might be a philosophy of building layers of languages -- actually, probably more like a tree. Or maybe a DAG if you have several implementations that express the same DSL. Contrast this with several distinct implementations of monolithic languages, which probably have no knowledge of each other (languages tend to end up shallowly similar, but subtle in many many small ways; probably Turing Complete which makes analysis tricky or at least not straightforward, certainly not reliable...). But when looked at in isolation they look simple; hey this language is really good at expressing X. It doesn't have that many user-visible constructs. Simplicity! Only when you look at the bigger picture, you see how much effort and code that goes into implementing software that is subtly different, only to give the feeling of simplicity when looked at more in isolation from the whole overarching system.
Some people will look at you in horror if you suggest using a powerful and expressive language. A language that can effectively express a lot of 'languages'. They find things like operator overloading disgusting, because code should look uniform and it should be "obvious" what it is doing. Then they choose to involve 12 different programming languages on a project, because that is obviously good engineering practice. The right tool for the job! The fact that they have to learn and deal with so many languages is apparently trivial to them. The difference between the semantics and ecosystems of a dozen different programming languages is simpler then learning about and judiciously using operator overloading, I guess.
I am not trying to diminish the need for programming languages -- they seem incredibly hard to design, and the more I read about them the more I get convinced of that. There are ever more considerations that they can choose to care about, potentially at the expense of something else immediately next to it or maybe something far away. It doesn't seem like the ones who are designing them are close to converging on designs that express many of the problems that programming languages can/should care about. I look forward to seeing more language (designs) -- hopefully ambitious ones. :-)
tl:dr; I should learn a Lisp. Code truly is data, or it should be. But not even Lisp is able to do everything with sufficiently many macros, it seems.