Programming Languages in the Era of the Cloud

Google was the first cloud company. It is still the most important one — its open source riff on an internal cloud, called Kubernetes, is now the de facto cloud as we know it these days.

Google excited our imagination with global-scale distributed systems. Big Table begat Hadoop. Machine translation opened the Babel tower or the siloed web cultures to each other. Google App Engine, Big Query and other Google Cloud offerings changed the way we build cloud-native applications.

But something else started to happen as Google grew. The set of programming languages allowed for use was restricted to just a few, Java, C++, Python. JavaScript for the web, and Go — an intentionally uncool and restrictive language, without type gymnastics or category theory foo, but with elegant concurrency, suitable for devops. Using git as a packaging system was a harbinger of the cloud standardization to come.

Will all cloud programming converge on a set of just a few approved languages? Will our IDEs, moving into the cloud, become standardized as well? Will the testing frameworks converge?

Will we all use GitHub as our development environment, with certain IDEs and workflow tools emerging as supermajority? What will happen with niche languages, understood and enjoyed by a few now? Will developers become conveyor belt automatons, with their skills commoditized and outsourced?

Or will software craftsmanship flourish in new ways? Our panel spans the whole spectrum. Jaana Dogan is an established speaker for Go and distributed database expert from her Google tenure, now reestablishing herself at AWS. Gabriel Volpe uses Scala at Chatroulette, using Nix for reproducible developer environments, testing, and deployments. Rúnar Bjarnason is creating Unison, a new way to program where your code gets distributed and built as you write it. Baruch Sadogurski is supporting developers in all their cloud building and deployment endeavors from the glorious Artifactory.

Come join our panel and let us find the truth in the debate, together!