Austen.Ito.Blog

Invest the time in mastering development tools, on the other hand, and you won’t want to give these tools up to try a new language —- the development tools are a major part of your productivity. For you, a new language doesn’t have many advantages over other languages anyway, because you haven’t studied how to use language features to make you productive.

Josh recently linked a blog post called, The IDE Divide, which made me start ranting to everyone I could find online. If you read it you can clearly see that Oliver Steele is an ultra-biased language maven. I don't understand how he can put people into 2 buckets, either you learn languages feature and are considered a pro-hacker or you use IDEs and suck. He honestly believes in using text editors because you can code anything. I could code using a typewriter and achieve the same effect.

In his diagrams, he shows that you have higher productivity gains if you use a text editor and learn language features rather than learning an IDE and not as much language features. I have two issues with that:

1. IDEs don't code for you, unless you use Visual Studio (says Josh). You still have to learn the intricacies of the language. Choosing an IDE doesn't lock you into a language. Not having awesome tools may introduce a larger barrier for entry, but it by doesn't stop people from learning new things. IDEs are just tools that help you get your job done.
   
   
2. What happens when you master an IDE? Do you just sit there and twiddle your thumbs? Mastering an IDE doesn't take nearly as long as mastering a language. Even if you spent all your time up front learning an IDE, there would still be a lot of time to learn the language. In fact, you don't even need to master an IDE to master a language. Maybe you could use the IDE as just a text editor with some language specific help thrown in. Now you have the best of both worlds with a very minimal startup cost. That has to be better in the long run.
   

Hacking is not about knowing a language inside and out or even mastering the tools you use. Hacking is about solving problems. If there is an easier way to get things done, then that is the method you should use. You should always find the right tool for the job. I don't buy the argument that being a language maven helps you to pick the right language for the job. People learn how to use tools and languages together. Being an advocate of languages or tools is not black and white. There is a very large gray area where people are interested in learning both aspects of development.

With that being said, the author is developing his own language so I can understand why he is bashing the people who use IDEs. His language is new and doesn't have very much tool support. Of course he has to use emacs or whatever text editor he chooses. That doesn't mean IDEs make people suck. Tools are tools. It's how you use them.

Day Two started off bright and early by following the hordes of Java One attendees.


Followed by Oracle's senior vice president pitching Oracle's new developer tool.

Hackers during ScriptBowl competition. It was cool because we could vote for the best scripting language after every round via sms.



Crazy Lines waiting for sessions. The event staff did their best to organize the lines, but after each session it was a mad dash to get to your designated areas.

On one side of the Moscone Center, there were gaming stations with more bean bags and chairs. They had people playing halo and wii tennis. There was also a rockband competition.


Me and Mark ending up eating at Ciopinno's down by the wharf. The garlic dungeness crab was great.

Instead of eating bagels and donuts for the third day in a row, we ended up going to Mel's Diner right by the hotel. It was expensive and mediocre. Kind of like a mainland Zippy's.

Cool blue keynote with IBM.

A slide from the Mylan session. I used mylyn a long-time ago and it seems to have been improved on a quite a bit. I intend to check it out again in the near future.

This was one of the lines coming out of the "Choosing your java web developement framework". The largest conference room was standing room only.

Cool presentation from Atlassian. Pimp my build!

Cole Hamels pitching to a Giant. Who is the giant?

Cole Hamels was in a bit of a rough spot so there was a conference with his team.



Charlie Manuel and Bruce Bochi.


The Flyin' Hawaiian, Shane Victorino. Go Hawaii!







Can't wait till next year. Worth every penny.

Registration! Around the hotel and the convention center Sun put up conference flags. It was kinda cool to walk around town looking for a place to eat and see the banners up. Registration was extremely easy. We entered our email address were given badges to wear around our next. They include RFID chips that they use to scan us into sesssions that we registered for and also to randomly pick us for more swag.

The cool thing is that this year they installed biometric sensors on all of the doors so they can track when people enter and exit. They brought up some telemetry streams that show when the presentation would start and end. What happens if there is a big spike of people leaving during the middle of the session?


After registration we headed to a huge conference hall with gigantic screens all over the place. We were greeted with people dancing to hip hop. Very weird. I took some videos, which will go up on you tube a little bit later.

James Gosling and his crew have a tradition of having a tshirt toss before they start talking. A girl next to us got a shirt. I hate her.

The CEO of Sun came up to talk about the mantra of JavaOne this year, which is Java + You. The motivation of the mantra is that software is no longer driven by enterprise needs. It is driven by consumers, thus a lot of the sessions this year talk about RIAs with JavaFX, web applications with J* scripting languages, and user interfaces that help people improve their lives.



Next up was a huge session load. Most of the sessions were really good. The best one by far was the More Effective Java with Josh Bloch. He highlighted new chapters in the 2nd edition of Effective Java. I picked up a copy at the JavaOne bookstore and plan on sharing a tech talk.

Sadly there was one session that was very boring with the presenters just reading off the slides and not adding any other information. Lame.









Onto the best part, the swag! Me and Mark walked around the pavilion area to get some cool gear and talk to people to see what's new out there in software land. The first booth we hit was Atlassian's, where we scored shirts and 10% off new/upgrades of their tools.

It was funny because we decided to hit each booth in order, but we ended up going towards the booths with the best swag. The first picture of the collage shows Mark with all of the gear we got. We had to make a pitstop at the hotel cause our shoulders were sore.

The lesson for our company when we go to the con in Orlando is to bring good swag. Pens and golf balls don't do it.

The first day of Java One was pretty long. I ended up getting back to the hotel around 11 after all of the sessions and eating dinner. Here is my schedule for today:

930-1030: The Script Bowl: A Rapidfire comparison of scripting languages
1050-1150: Improving application performance with Monitoring and Profiling Tools
130-230: JRuby on Rails: Web Development Evolved
250-350: Creating a compelling user interface
410-510: Putting 3D earth into your applications and webpages
630-730: How to build restful clients with javascript, ruby and java fx
830-920: The future of testing: How community engagement is changing the rules

It's Boys Day and the day before Java One. I'm planning on putting up pics and keep a log of what's going down in frisco.

It's going to be a busy day tommorow with a mad dash for swag and loot at 11:30. My schedule tommorow is looking good:

830am - 1030am : Sun General Session: Java + You
1050am - 1150am: Fortress: A Next-Generation Programming Language Brought to You by Sun
1130am - 1210pm: The great swag dash + lunch
1210pm - 110pm: More Effective Java. Josh Bloch!
130pm - 300pm: Sun General Session Java-Centricity: Leveraging Java Technology at the hub of your Digital Life
440pm - 550pm: Real World, Real Time, Instant Results: Make Information Work for You
600pm - 700pm: SCA: Flexible and Agile Composition of Distributed Service-Oriented Architecture Applications
730pm - 820pm: Practical Applications of Static Java™ Technology-Based Bytecode Analysis and Transformation

Pics + News + Videos(maybe) to come!