Curry On
Amsterdam!
July 16-17th, 2018


Simplicity - The Road Not Taken?
Dave Thomas
Kx Systems


Abstract

It appears that there is a software complexity conspiracy seeking to make the development of even straightforward applications challenging. To be successful today one needs to cope with the full-stack, and constantly changing collection of languages, apis, runtimes, tools and frameworks. The different levels of maturity and quality require that developers learn by trial and error. The sheer volume of APIs is daunting. Complexity begets complexity! Yet applications for the most part are not complicated.
We argue that hardware enables simplicities in software. That modern applications don’t need to be as complicated as they are. We examine application domains to illustrate the value of an approach we call collection oriented programming.

Bio

Dave Thomas, Chief Scientist/CSO, Kx Systems, Co-Founder and past Chairman of Bedarra Research Labs (BRL), creators of the Ivy visual analytics workbench and ACM Distinguished Engineer. Founder and past CEO of Object Technology International (OTI), becoming CEO of IBM OTI Labs after its sale to IBM. With a unique ability to see the future and translate research into competitive products, he is known for his contributions to Object Technology including IBM VisualAge and Eclipse IDEs, Smalltalk and Java virtual machines. Dave is a popular, humorous, albeit opinionated keynote speaker with an impressive breadth of business experience and technical depth. He is a thought leader in large-scale software engineering and a founding director of the Agile Alliance. With close links the R&D community Dave is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University in Canada and held past positions at UQ and QUT in Australia. He has been a business and technical advisor to many technology companies including Kx Systems. Dave is founder and chairman of the YOW! Australia and Lambda Jam conferences, and is a GOTO Conference Fellow.