Syntactic Salt and Sugar

For the past few years and currently there is much hype around simplifying and reducing the noise in the code. Whether it’s DSL’s, closures (Project Lambda), aspects, CDI, or annotations, fundamental changes have and are occurring that are loosely classified as syntactic sugar. This presentation takes a step back by having an open and honest discussion from two different perspectives from an advocate for the syntactic sugar and a pragmatic engineer that sees some of it as syntactic salt. Whether you see these elements as sugar or salt, you can take a step back and assess whether these elements really simplify the code or make the code more complex.

Jim Gould has more than 20 years of a wide spectrum of experience in the software industry. Strengths include Architecture, Analysis, Design and Development of both web based and non-web based enterprise applications using Distributed and Object Oriented technologies. Jim has presented at conferences around the world on enterprise-level and security topics, including numerous presentations at JavaOne (2005-2011) and at Jazoon (2010-2011). Alex Holmes is a Software Engineer with over a decade of experience developing large scale distributed Java systems. He currently is a technical lead at VeriSign, using Hadoop as a Big Data platform. Alex previously developed an Internet crawl, analysis and search system using Hadoop and machine classification algorithms. Alex is currently writing a book for Manning titled "Hadoop in Practice", and has been a presenter in JavaOne (2011).