Interview: Neal Ford On Programming Languages and Platforms

Write for InfoQ

In this interview made by Sadek Drobi during QCon San Francisco 2007, Neal Ford talks about the tendency of having multiple languages running on one of the two major platforms existing today: Java and .NET. He also presents the advantages offered by Ruby compared to static languages like Java or C#.

Watch: Neal Ford On Programming Languages and Platforms (32 min)

Neal talks about the need of developing languages, like Ruby and Groovy, to run on top of the JVM due to limitations of the Java language. Ruby, he says, is a powerful dynamic language offering the programmer the ability to write cool stuff in simple ways, giving him more flexibility and increasing his productivity.

Neal also talks a lot about meta-programming. He notices the limited meta-programming features existing in Java, and makes a case for the meta-programming support existing in Ruby.

Neal thinks that in the next decade, we will see several, some of them specialized, languages running on the most prominent platforms existing today, Java and .NET. This combination of languages-platforms allow the developers to choose the most efficient language for a specific task while not having to worry about deploying the resulting code since it runs on well tested and proven platforms.

Related Topics:

• Development
• Architecture & Design
• JVM
• Platforms
• Infrastructure
• RubyGems
• .NET
• Ruby
• Java
• CLR
• QCon San Francisco 2007
• Groovy
• Ruby on Rails
• Enterprise Architecture

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