JavaZone 2009 - Dynamic Languages: the next big thing for the JVM or an evolutionary dead end?
There is a good reason why dynamic languages such as Groovy and Ruby are getting a lot of attention. They are powerful, expressive languages that enable developers to easily write concise programs. However, not all of their benefits derive from being dynamic. Many important benefits are simply due to modern language design such as the support for closures. Moreover, dynamic languages have some inherent drawbacks. The extremely limited compile-time checking requires developers to write significantly more tests and severely limits how much help an IDE can provide to a developer.
Chris Richardson
Chris Richardson is a developer, architect and mentor with over 20 years of experience and is the author of the book "POJOs in Action." He runs a consulting and training company that helps customers reduce the cost of development and increase the effectiveness of their development teams. His technical interests include domain-driven design, cloud computing and developer testing. Chris has been a technical leader at a variety of companies including Insignia Solutions and BEA Systems and recently became a Java Champion. Chris is the founder of Cloud Tools, which is an open-source project for quickly and easily deploying Java applications on Amazon EC2, and of Cloud Foundry, which provides outsourced, automated data center management. He has spoken at various conferences including JavaOne 2006/2007/2008, No Fluff Just Stuff Java Symposiums, Colorado Software Summit, SD West, The Spring Experience, SpringOne, and Javapolis as well as Java user groups. Chris holds a computer science degree from the Cambridge University in England and lives in Oakland, CA where he runs the local Java User Group. Website and blog: http://chrisrichardson.net/