I recently got the chance to attend JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark. Besides learning a great amount about various approaches to solving hard problems that we all face as programmers (regardless of the stack we spend most of our time developing on), I got to meet so many interesting people from all walks of programmer life.

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 obtain 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 Software for a concurrent world: (Pragmatic Bookshelf - July 15, 2007). He is married with 2 children, 2 cats and 4 motorcycles and would very much like to sell his Royal Enfield Bullet and replace it with a Norton Commando.



Mads Torgersen is a Senior Program Manager in the C# group and has been working on the design of LINQ and other new C# language features. Before joining Microsoft, Mads worked as an associate professor in computer science at the university of Aarhus, where he was part of the group that developed wildcards for Java generics.



Here, in part one of a two part interview, Joe and Mads discuss the pros and cons of object oriented programming, the new spotlight on concurrency and the future of languages (it should come as no surprise, for those of you who understand Erlang, that Joe is not a big time proponent of OO...). Erik Meijer, who is listening into the conversation will appear at random intervals to add his usual brilliant perspective.



This is a fantastic discussion. Listen in and learn from some of programming's masters. This was a real treat for me and one of the highlights of my time at JAOO.