Last Saturday I attended a Java-related conference - Confitura. My main goal was to see the IT world from another side. I think that every developer should concentrate not only on his area of expertise but also stay in touch with overall trends. That’s why we have nHibernate or Nancy in .NET world - the leader of those projects had to know or have heard about the original implementation in other languages. It’s like “Think global, act local” statement.

So how was it?

I’ll not describe each session I’ve attended, but in general, they face pretty much the same problems as we do. Sometimes they are a little bit ahead and sometimes we are. For example, lambda expressions are something introduced in the newest Java version… but they still miss get/set accessors… a little bit silly but true. Although the language still sucks, there are good things as well.

Anything about .NET?

Before the conference I was wondering if there would be some “hate” or anything else where .NET related stuff will be compared to Java. And there wasn’t! There was Pascal, PolyPascal to be precise. On one of the slides, PolyPascal and Anders Hejlsberg photo were side by side. The speaker asked: “What is Anders Hejlsberg famous for?” To my surprise, nobody knew… Or I answered too fast :D But it seems that Java guys don’t look at the .NET world.

Summary

Was it worth it? I think it was. People with a slightly different mindset, little biased and limited by their programming language, but with good ideas and solutions. I’m glad that I was a part of this event.