Keynote: One Hacker Way - Erik Meijer

[piano music]

[applause]
What Ano didn't want to say

is that programming languages are my
substitute girlfriend. [laughter]

It's easier to get a relationship with a
programming language than a, you know

But you have to take her kind of dating
course.

Alright! Since I'm going to maybe insult
some people, you know, maybe I step on

some toes, I just want to say kind of, you
know, this is just my personal opinion

Also, I want you to think about this and
then make your own decisions.

All I want to do is make you think,
and ultimately you decide for yourself.

Alright! Of course, you expect a talk
where I'm going to go and scream and

curse and talk about how HR and Scrum
are cancer that needs to be eliminated

from this industry, right? That's what you
all signed up for, you all kind of have

your beers, your snacks ready. Um,
I have to say this talk is not going to be

like that. And what I want to do is I want
to take you back to a little bit of some

recent history. And in 2013 I left
Microsoft. This was when Vollmer was

kind of in charge; now he's doing some
basketball team.

Think that's way better for him.
[laughter]

But, you know, I left Microsoft with the
goal to make the world asynchronous

and reactive. So I founded this small
company, Applied Duality, that was trying

to do that. And then, in June, one of the
first customers I had was Facebook where

I worked with them on a language called
Hack. Hack is a version of PHP that looks

like a version of PHP that looks like
PHP but under the covers it's really OCaml

Facebook is all written in Hack but really
it's written in OCaml with Hack syntax,

with PHP syntax.

So funtional programming-- if you're not doing functional programming yet, you're already behind.

So who here is not doing functional programming? OK, you can go home now [laughter]

and maybe do a startup course but in a few years it will be obsolete. [laughter]

And then slightly later that year I started to work with Netflix on RxJava

and I guess there is this thing has been a runaway success I think a lot of people are using it that has gone beyond my wildest dreams.

Let's look at 2013-- eh 2014. At Microsoft I did programming languages as a hobby but it turned out with my startup that it became a way to make money.

So in April 2014 I worked with Google on Dart and there I helped Dart to get also support for asynchronous programming ASynch 08

And Dart already had support for streams and now we put our API in API for streams and now we put that in the language as well.

So Dart is one of the few languages that has gone up complete support for synchronous, iterators, ASynch 08

and streams all build in the language.

If you haven't looked at Dart yet, I would really say: give it a try just like you should give Hack a try.