Simon Thorneycroft and Jonathan Hodgson

RESTafarian evening at Thoughtworks

Last night I attended the Thoughtworks Geek Night at Thoughtworks rather impressively XP friendly London offices. Adewale Oshineye gave a great introduction to the ideas of and played devils advocate for the REST architectural style. REST was proposed by Roy Fielding in his PhD dissertation and is an acronym for Representational State Transfer. Whilst I remained unconvinced of the wider applicability of REST, it was good to see such a simple and elegant mechanism for perhaps exploring a domain of objects online and perhaps will become more popular as it is certainly an application of the simplest that could possibly work principle.

Towards the end of the evening the conversation turned to favourite languages with a particular leaning towards those that gave productivity gains. Of course, C# was high up on my list and that of a few of the others; Ade favoured Java purely because of the excellent IntelliJ IDEA (and who could blame him). Perl was not as popular as some might have thought and a quick look at a periodic table of "well over a hundred operators" for the current design of Perl 6 showed why. Ade also introduced me to a language that I had never seen before but I will certainly try using, it is called IO and takes its inspiration from smalltalk. All in all an enjoyable evening.