scala bythebay io: Bill Venners Interview
Recording: scala bythebay io: Bill Venners Interview
you bill venner's our team Incan president and CEO oh well I was artema was a developer community website for many years and back in the mid-90s we were always looking around for interesting stories and somehow we caught wind of a release of Scala and we put a news item about a scholar release this is in 1919 is that could I be right this is 2016 so that would have been 2006 yes it wasn't it wasn't before scale existed so it's 2006 and we got an email from this guy named Martin Adair ski said actually you didn't quite get it right it's not just about XML so anyway oh we talked about the XML literals in it and so what happened was we in our like looking around for news items and interviewing people we kind of got this feeling that the world might be ready for functional programming that it might be ready to go mainstream this from not just from you know Scala but other other things like in Ruby and Python which were quite popular people were saying that that it you know the dynamic typing was the future but within its when you ask them why they would mention things were actually functional features of that language so we contacted Martin order ski at one point say hey can we talk to you on the phone so we got a phone call with them and said would you like to write articles and about functional programming and you skull as the example because we thought we would try to lead by getting in front of where he thought people wanted to go anyway and he said sure and and he said I was also thinking to be we should there should be a book about Scala and we said well we've been thinking about publishing books we hadn't done it yet so we decided while we do that together so that's how the programming in Scala came about so I wasn't originally going to be an it was not going to be an author which is going to be Martin no deerskin like spoon and our team was going to publish it but it was a huge task so we needed another author and and then I decided that you know I would volunteer because then I could go around and promote it and they would give me more credibility but the problem is i didn't know scala right and i'm suppose be like helping write a book about it so the way I I did two things one is we have a meeting every week with me and Lex and Martin OD risky so I got to ask questions so that was invaluable for like two years a year and a half I got a half an hour to an hour a week with Martin and then then I had this test framework called sweet runner and I thought you know when I port this to scala just as an exercise and I could all learn learn Scala that way and that's where scala test came from so so I learned by you know asking martin and lex questions and and writing scala test as a way to learn Scala yeah i think my ideals deck his pancakes actually but i had that yesterday yeah I don't know I actually I I wouldn't know Jas does not pop to mind so the JVM i guess i'm an old java guy and yeah i don't know i don't have a good answer for that I think things are always we do consulting and we sort of use you know what that's really sort of decided usually for what I have to do programming so oh well when I go to conferences because I it's kind of like I go to a lot of scholar conferences and you see old friends and I tend to not go to the talks very much because I can watch them later and I get a lot out of talking to people and meeting new people I really like but just I think it's quite stimulating to just talk about stuff and this this week it was oh it was just really nice to to talk to friends actually this is a tough week so it was good to see people so I think in particular I can't really pulling one out but just the fact that you know what getting together in person is a really important part of the community we do a lot of stuff or the internet and over these you know get er or email lists or whatever but getting together in person is really an important thing [Music] you