Resumo: Erlang is a programming language explicitly designed for building robust, distributed, soft real-time, distributed systems. Erlang is becoming widely adopted for implementing massively parallel Internet services. For example Facebook recently announced that they were handling over one billions messages/day in their Erlang-based chat system. Erlang programs are built from a large number of communicating parallel processes. These processes share no memory and communicate by pure copying message passing. This model of programming is easy to understand, is scalable and functions well in the presence of errors. There is no shared memory and the programs have no locks so Erlang programs can easily be parallelised and run on multicore computers. Erlang process are written in a functional programming language with a dynamic type system. This talk highlights the Erlang view of the world - showing how we can model the world using concurrent processes, and how we can program these processes in a simple functional language. We'll also look at some of the commercial areas where Erlang is being used and see what kind of problems are best suited to the Erlang approach.

Biografia: Joe Armstrong is the principle inventor of the Erlang programming Language and coined the term "Concurrency Oriented Programming". He has worked for Ericsson where he developed Erlang and was chief architect of the Erlang/OTP system. In 1998 he left Ericsson to form Bluetail, a company which developed all its products in Erlang. In 2003 he obtained his PhD from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. The title of his thesis was "Making reliable distributed systems in the presence of software errors." Today he works for Ericsson. He is author of the book "Programming Erlang - Software for a concurrent world" (Pragmatic Bookshelf - July, 2007).

Resumo: F# is a programming language from Microsoft Research that is becoming part of the languages distributed with Visual Studio 2010. This is a very exciting news since F# has its roots in ML, a programming language with a very strong research tradition, and it features functional programming as a programming paradigm. Nevertheless, the language is fully integrated in the .NET architecture and it allows first class application development for the .NET platform. F# interactive, the language top-level, is a significant contribution in itself, making the language the missing link between compiled and dynamic languages, with the performances of the former and the coding style similar to the latter. In this talk I will introduce F# interactively, introducing the most important language features and the programming environment. VSLab, a project developed at University of Pisa will also be presented, as an addition to F# for supporting scientific computing.

Biografia: Antonio Cisternino is assistant professor in the Computer Science Department of the University of Pisa. His primary research is on meta-programming and domain-specific languages on virtual-machine-based execution environments. He's been active in the .NET community since 2001, and developed VSLab, a Visual Studio addin to support Matlab-like programming in F# and Visual Studio. He is also author of annotated C#, an extension of C#, and Robotics4.NET, a framework for programming robots with .NET. He co-authored the "Expert F#" book on the F# programming language together with the author of the language Don Syme. Antonio holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Pisa.

Resumo: Java is fourteen years old and a mature and stable platform for the development of all types of applications from smart-cards to eBay. It's development has not stopped and Java continues to evolve, helped by the open source OpenJDK project. This session will explain what features will be included in the next version of the Java platform, JDK7. There will also be some discussion about what features had been proposed and are now no longer to be included. The three big functional components that will be covered are:

• Modularisation of the JDK (Project Jigsaw)
• Small language changes (Projct Coin)
• Better support for dynamic languages running on the JVM (The Da Vinci Machine Project)

Biografia: Simon Ritter specialises in looking at emerging technologies including grid computing, RFID, wireless sensor networks, robotics and wearable computing. Simon has been in the IT business since 1984 and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Physics from Brunel University in the U.K.Originally working in the area of UNIX development for AT&T UNIX System Labs and then Novell, Simon joined Sun in 1996 and started working with Java technology; he has spent time doing both Java development and consultancy.