Gone are the days when your company was limited to C++ or Java. The last few years have seen an explosion of programming languages promising "10x more productivity" or a "quicker return on investment" but what is the reality behind these claims? Programming language choice has an impact far beyond the immediate, after all COBOL applications still perform billions of business critical transactions every day and an estimated 86-94%* of software cost is incurred post development. In addition, the world of computing is changing, Moore's Law still holds, but in an unexpected way - we can no longer rely on faster CPUs to boost performance, instead we need to have multiple CPU cores. So what does this mean for language choice in the Enterprise? This Quarterly Technology Briefing will explore these dilemmas and offer practical advice on how to balance often opposing concerns; stability vs innovation; fast to market vs easy to maintain; fashion vs staff retention; etc. We'll do this by looking at historical motivations for changing patterns of language use and ask which of those, alongside which new forces and pressures should we be considering today.
Speakers
Ian Cartwright Ian is a Principal Technical Consultant and Architect with ThoughtWorks. He consults with companies on enterprise and software architecture, in particular around integration and SOA solutions. He is especially interested in the challenges of asynchronous concurrent software, the alignment of business and IT and the use of cloud and grid solutions. Ian is a member of the ThoughtWorks Technology Advisory Board.
James Lewis James Lewis is a Principal Consultant for ThoughtWorks based in the UK where he has helped introduce Agile practices to various blue chip companies: Investment Banks, Publishers and media organisations. James studied Astrophysics in the 90's but got sick of programming in Fortran. Fourteen years of DBA, Java development, software design and software architecture later, he believes that writing software is the easy part of the problem. Most of the time it's about getting people thinking right. He is passionate about the XP practices, seeding cultural change within organisations and applying what he's learnt to deploy maintainable, robust and scalable software into production on time and on budget.
