Google Tech Talk
April 25, 2012

Presented by Sameer Ajmani

ABSTRACT

Go is an open source programming environment that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. One of Go's key design goals is code adaptability; that it should be easy to take a simple design and build upon it in a clean and natural way. Go Version 1 (or Go 1 for short), which defines a language and a set of core libraries to provide a stable foundation for creating reliable products, projects, and publications, was recently released and available for use.

Go was born out of frustration with existing languages and environments for systems programming. Programming had become too difficult and the choice of languages was partly to blame. One had to choose either efficient compilation, efficient execution, or ease of programming; all three were not available in the same mainstream language. Programmers who could were choosing ease over safety and efficiency by moving to dynamically typed languages such as Python and JavaScript rather than C++ or, to a lesser extent, Java.

Go is an attempt to combine the ease of programming of an interpreted, dynamically typed language with the efficiency and safety of a statically typed, compiled language. It also aims to be modern, with support for networked and multicore computing. Finally, it is intended to be fast: it should take at most a few seconds to build a large executable on a single computer. To meet these goals required addressing a number of linguistic issues: an expressive but lightweight type system; concurrency and garbage collection; rigid dependency specification; and so on. These cannot be addressed well by libraries or tools; a new language was called for.

Sameer Ajmani, a Software Engineer at Google and member of the Go programming language engineering team, will give a introduction to Go from a programmer's perspective. Sameer joined Google engineering after receiving his PhD from MIT and has worked on several core infrastructure projects at Google.

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Google Tech Talk
July 28, 2010

Presented by Charles Oliver Nutter and John Woodell.

ABSTRACT

Much has been made of having more expressive languages for the JVM. The recent explosion of interest in alternative JVM languages has shown there's a need for something better. But have Scala, Groovy, Fantom achieved this goal?

We'll look at Mirah, which attempts to implement Ruby's apparent features directly atop JVM types and code. In each case there have been gains and losses.

Ruby often provides beautiful abstractions, but sometimes requires odd things of the JVM that influence performance. The dynamic capabilities are incredibly expressive, but we often need more static structure to enforce typing guarantees or integrate with the platform. On top of all this, much of Ruby's dynamism makes it very difficult to optimize on the JVM. Can we get those features in another way?

Mirah may be one answer. It takes as a starting point the "apparent features" of Ruby, and as an end point the basic structures of the JVM, and attempts to tie them directly together. With a fairly simple compiler, Mirah can almost mimic the most common Ruby abstractions, but with static typing guarantees and no runtime library requirements. It provides a Ruby-like way to write Java, the ultimate goal of so many JVM languages.

Charles Oliver Nutter has been programming most of his life, as a Java developer for the past decade and as a JRuby developer for over four years. He co-leads the JRuby project, an effort to bring the beauty of Ruby and the power of the JVM together. Charles believes in open source and open standards and hopes his efforts on JRuby and other languages will ensure the JVM remains the preferred open-source managed runtime for many years to come.

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Google Tech Talk (more info below)
October 14, 2011

Presented by Mark Lentczner.

ABSTRACT

Want to know a little more about programming Haskell than just the buzz-words? This talk will show you some of the joys coding in Haskell through lots and lots of code examples.

No prior experience with Haskell or functional programming required. Just be ready for some strange and wondrous code!

Slides: http://www.ozonehouse.com/mark/haskell-amuse-bouche/slides.html
Code: https://github.com/mtnviewmark/haskell-amuse-bouche (tag v2 matches the video)

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