On language popularity in first quarter of 2013

Recently I found this great graph showing language popularity basing on stack overflow and github tags:

On the upper right hand side we see the most popular languages: the front line. Most of them are really not a surprise: JAVA, PHP, C/C++, C#, Obj-C, PERL or Ruby. Those are the once that have been in that spotlight for a while now. What's interesting is the strong position of JavaScript (man that language grows) and Python with its second youth sponsored by indie games.

Not so far away (in compare with older reports) is the second wave of computer languages. One could say that those are the newcomers which are building it's community, but there are some old friends too. The unquestionable leader of the second wave is Scala almost ready to join the mainstream (I've separated it in a one dot set on the graph). The other new popular JVM languages are also there: Clojure and Groovy, although it could have been predicted as those three were gathering bigger and bigger community all the time. It's about time for them to slowly replace JAVA in some applications. 

Interesting that the mentioned old friends: Prolog, Haskel or Lua are there. Those three are really passing the test of time - always in the shadows of mainstream languages but never going down. 

What really got me thinking was how far Rust was from D. Is it that C-family programmers are not so eager  to try out new things?

"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."

One thing is certain - new times require new tools, and more and more people realizes that everyday. Mainstream languages will be there with us for long time, but the faster can we adapt to the "second wave" the better our situation on job market will be, and what's more important: the more exiting our everyday work will be. The second wave of languages is on its constant way to join the first way, or even to step into it's place. 

Atmosphere 2013

Earlier this week  I had a great pleasure to participate in the first edition of Atmosphere - an e-commerce industry conference. I must admit I went there full of doubts. Can the  first edition of such an anonymous event be a success, especially that it was a payed conference? Fortunately it can! When I arrived I saw the whole place  buzzing with people talking about all the cool stuff. 

It all started with refreshing keynote from Brian McCallister. It was interesting to listen that all startups travel the same evolutionary path. The refreshing part was hearing that "this is OK". That those technical debts we make at the start of a project are caused by good intentions and important reasons. How to mix this general truth with rules of software craftsmanship is yet to be discovered for me. 

"There are two types of startups. Those successful and a little ashamed of their code and those who're out of business"

Continuing tale of the startups Paul Hammond spoke about choices you can make to not run out of money during the first months of the project. That was a really great talk divided into few simple lessons.

My colleagues from Toruń working on Allegro Charity Platform (running for example wosp.allegro.pl) gave a great talk about technology and architecture they've used to handle the traffic of latest WOSP final. 

Talking about handling Allegro traffic our Poznań division did a great job sharing some of our experiences in that field fallowed by lecture of both: technologies and methodologies we use to handle such a high traffic with good site responsiveness.

There were plenty more interesting presentations there but those above are my personal favorites. I'm really looking forward to publication of the videos to watch the ones I missed from other tracks.

Personally I had an honor to give a speech about choosing the programming language for a project covering JAVA, PHP, Erlang and Perl as main characters. I would like to thank all the attendees for being there and I hope you had a good time taking part in this trip through magical lands of programming languages.

The conference was a blast. On top of great speakers, delicious food and wild party; all of the attendees left with their own raspberry pi  as a gadget. I have some plans how to use mine and I will share it with you if I succeed.
I'm looking forward for next years edition. Hope to meet you there too!

Hello World!

It's been a while since I had a blog. Because many people during conferences asked me if  I had a blog - I've decided to start one. I believe I have some cool stuff to share. I hope you will find it interesting. Don't hesitate to leave comments to let me know how do you like it.