Avi Bryant's Keynote on Seaside



Avi is one of the original authors of the Seaside web-app framework, which is a novel (maybe not, but novel to me) approach to developing web apps. One of the reasons why he was asked to speak (I presume) is because his implementation really demonstrates some of the fundamental advantages that a language like Smalltalk has over other, less flexible environments. In fact, he showed us some stuff that Java (and others, Java is just a convenient target here) is fundamentally incapable of doing.

The talk drew a lot of inspiration from an essay of Paul Graham's about the construction of Yahoo! store that everybody should immediately read. (It talks a lot about the dangers of groupthink that seem rampant in some IT shops).

The keynote degenerated into a lot of talk about the implementation details (hey, we're all geeks here), but I think that the important message got through: we can't compete with other technologies if we play by their rules, so we should change the rules to our advantage by doing things we know they can't.

Maybe that's too much of a call to arms. Java isn't horrible, it just isn't the best tool for every job.

Posted: Mon - May 3, 2004 at 09:43 PM      

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