La première édition de PolyConf s'est tenue octobre 2014 à Poznań, en Pologne, avec un thème plutôt inhabituel : le polyglottisme. Autrement dit, le fait de ne pas se spécialiser en tant que développeur sur un langage spécifique, pour préférer une approche polyvalente. Concrètement, cela s'est reflété dans le programme de l'événement qui a traité de nombreux sujets: Ruby, Python, Haskell, Erlang, Go, Java, F#, Javascript, ...
L'édition précédente ayant été un succès, une nouvelle édition est en cours d'organisation pour 2015 (le call-for-paper est ouvert jusqu'au 28 mars et accessible à cette adresse).
A cette occasion, nous avons posé quelques questions à Zaiste et Kasia qui sont à l'origine de la PolyConf (interview en anglais).
InfoQ FR: Hi Zaiste, Kasia! Can you introduce us the PolyConf?
Hi InfoQ FR. Sure! PolyConf is a conference for programmers interested in polyglot approach to software development.
We wanted developers from different « worlds » i.e. using different programming languages to meet and mingle in order to exchange experiences. We believe that in today's world you can no longer be a specialist in only one language. At PolyConf we want to combine and contrast different technologies and facilitate the exchange between their respective communities.
InfoQ FR: Why did you create this event: did you feel the need of a conference specifically having a polyglot approach?
With PolyConf we wanted to help programmers to experience a bit of something different; encourage them to try to go out of our comfort zones and see the other, maybe darker and less known side of things. That was the initial thought from which PolyConf was born. There is a lot of interesting things happening in various areas of software development. Sometimes it is difficult to keep up with all that progress - PolyConf aims to help with that.
InfoQ FR: About this approach, is it something important for you? Do you think every developer shoud adopt this philosophy or is it complementary to having an high expertise in a choosen language?
We believe that programming and all of computer science is universal and that programmers should be polyglots by default. Most of us are already working with several programming languages on daily basis not even being aware of it e.g. command line scripting (Bash, Zsh), ad-hoc text parsing using Python or Perl etc. More intentional interest in « polyglot » approach only helps, it opens your mind and gives you a different perspective on programming in general.
InfoQ FR: How was the first edition? Will you change something for 2015?
1st edition went really well. We had more than 30 speakers and about 30 talks with 300 people participating. We were surprised by the highly positive feedback we got.
This year we will focus primarily on Clojure, Haskell and Erlang along with decent topics both from mainstream and esoteric programming languages (Julia, Racket, LFE), so the programming community could easily learn from each other.
InfoQ FR: Thanks Kasia, Zaiste for your time and good luck for the next PolyConf!
Vous pourrez également trouver sur la chaîne Youtube de la conférence un résumé de la première édition et les enregistrements des sessions !