fredag, mars 09, 2007

Two days in Kraków

So, I've been in Kraków for two days now. I will fly back on Sunday. It's a very interesting town. On one part, it's lovely. The buildings are absolutely amazing, and very beautiful. On the other hand, many of them are very run down, and the wear and tear is obvious all around. To me, the whole town seems sort of depressing, but on the other hand the people here are very up beat, and from some of the presentations I've seen, the technological future for Kraków looks very bright indeed.

I haven't really been able to see most of the presentations. Almost all have been in Polish, sadly enough. I did see two interesting ones yesterday. The first was Michael Foords talk about IronPython. This was very neat and I've talked some with him after that too. I'll get back to that. The other talk was about Google Ads, by Greg Badros. As always, hearing about how Google does things internally is always amazingly interesting. I would have enjoyed hearing more about the machine learning and NLP stuff they're doing, but obviously they can't discuss that too much.

Today I haven't been able to see any presentation, due to Polish. On the other hand me, Michael and Lukas Renggli have had some very interesting discussions both yesterday and today. Now, the company Michael's part of has the largest IronPython code base in the world, as far as I understand it. It's basically 90 000 LOC, where 20 000 is production code and 70 000 are testing code. That sounds about right... =)

Lukas Renggli is one of the core developers of Seaside, a framework which I'm quite fond of. What we three have in common is our interest in dynamic languages, so we had some very common ground to talk about. What's nice is that many of the things Michael talked about in his presentation is stuff we in JRuby also speak much about. In the same manner, it seems the IronPython guys have had basically the same problems we in JRuby has had. It seems there is some common ground to be found here, and possibly also a basis for conversations. I for one would find that very interesting, since I enjoy hearing about dynamic languages getting foot holds on statically typed virtual machines; that is just such a sweet spot.

Tomorrow evening is my talk. I'm going to be at an official dinner in the middle of the day, and then get over to the conference and give my presentation at 17:00. I think it's going to be interesting, and it will be an obvious counterpart to Michael's talk, since the reason for existing is so similar for IronPython and JRuby. It will be interesting to see how the audience react.

After that, I'll see Lukas talk about Seaside, and after that people are talking about having a party, so tomorrow will be quite intense. And finally, on Sunday I'm going back to Sweden. As far as I know now, I won't travel that much for at least a month now, which feels sort of nice. This week has been far to intense, and also have had some really great - but tiring - moments.

9 kommentarer:

Anonym sa...

funny thing, do you know, that your name Ola means in Polish language short version of female name Aleksandra? :)

Michael Foord sa...

Hey Ola. I can't think of a sensible comment, but I just wanted to say hi. :-)

Michael Foord

Anonym sa...

Your presentation today was very interesting, i'm pretty sure to take a closer look to jruby;)

Anonym sa...

Very good & interesting presentation. Much better than I expected, grats! And pretty amazing wallpaper :P

Unknown sa...

Your presentation was interesting, though I had thought you would have given more details of the jruby implementation, especially the things which are hard to do. E.g. Lukas pointed out, that continuations are hard to implement in Java, so how did you do that (maybe I should have asked about that after the presentation ;)?

Another thing which was a little bit suspicius was the performence part - you cliamed that jruby is almost as fast as native implementation, but rails running on jruby were substantialy slower compared to native implementation.

On the other side, I was amazed seeing the Swing example (despite I don't use it :). It was really gorgeous!

Thank you very much for comming to Poland. You are allways welcome!

pora sa...
Den här kommentaren har tagits bort av skribenten.
Ola Bini sa...

logan: yeah, I was told that about 6 times just on Saturday. =)

apohllo: well, you should see the speed of regular Rails on my laptop. actually, the reason it seemed slow was most because of the laptop. A small measure of it is also because of startup time. JRuby is slower since we need to first start the JVM and then initialize the runtime.

pora sa...

Good presentation. I did not know JRuby is so mature now. I gave him try last year but it was very slow and rails incompatible. Now I'll give them second chance.

Anonym sa...

Heh - nice presentation. Thx to it I tried out jruby.