Sergio Bossa
Who is Sergio Bossa?
I’m a software developer, sometimes hands-on architect too, with a true passion for clean, elegant and efficient code and architectures, who likes being constantly challenged, learn new things and share them with peers.
That’s probably the reason that I love open source (and open communities) so much: open source is the ideal environment to find challenging tasks, learn new things and share them with the world.
Scala or Java?
While I started looking at the Scala language several years ago, I could say something unpopular here: I currently don’t see any reason to choose Scala over Java.
It’s true Scala is more expressive and often powerful thanks to its hybrid functional features, but you can accomplish the exact same things with Java: it’s just a matter of good programming practices.
If I had to choose a language over Java, I’d probably go with Clojure and/or Erlang: they’re really refreshing and mind blowing.
What does your typical day look like?
I usually wake up early in the morning, about 6:30 o’clock: I love morning air and lights, early breakfast and a silent house.
I get a shower, have my breakfast, check my emails, and go to the office.
At the office I usually start with reading more emails, tweets, blogs and the most interesting articles I find.
Then I start my daily job tasks, until evening, when I try to spend one or two hours reading more or working on open source stuff.
Finally, when I come back home at about 08:00 PM, it’s time for my family: so I usually unwind with my fiancee and my dog.
What do you do in your free time?
In my free time I try to balance my technical readings and my work on open source projects with more relaxing activities: brain needs to be “de-focused” after all!
Joking aside, I also like reading novels and science articles, listening to music, watching good movies and TV series and hanging around with my fiancee.
Current favorite apps?
Probably Twitter, as of now: it’s a great medium for sharing ideas, and a great source of information.
Oh, and in recent times I fell in love with Mercurial Distributed Version Control: powerful and intuitive at the same time!
What OS do you prefer?
MacOSX is my operating system of choice: it’s UNIX, it works pretty well and is beautifully shaped too!
Anyways, prior to choosing Apple, I used Linux for several years: I’d never, never, use Windows.
Small picture for your Workplace?
What’s your favourite Open Source framework?
That’s an hard question, because I love (and constantly use) lots of open source software: the Terracotta platform and JBoss Netty, just to name a few.
Recently, Riak, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, are grabbing special attentions too.
Name something that has inspired you recently?
Twitter is absolutely a constant source of information and inspiration, too.
Other than that, the Erlang language, which has recently been of great inspiration for my works on concurrent and distributed systems, and the Amazon Dynamo and Yahoo PNUTS papers, together with the NOSQL movement in general, which opened my mind about different kinds of storage and polyglot persistence.
What do you prefer (and why)? Freelance work or full time employment?
I prefer full time employment and commitment, because I like to be part of a “vision” and strive for that, working on motivating and challenging tasks with smart people, involving open source stuff, concurrent and distributed systems.
What are your personnel projects and goals for 2010?
Read more books (I buy tons of books but usually don’t have that much time), seriously learn Clojure, give a second chance to Scala, and, more generally: improve my skills and learn new stuff!
“It’s true Scala is more expressive and often powerful thanks to its hybrid functional features, but you can accomplish the exact same things with Java: it’s just a matter of good programming practices….I’d probably go with Clojure and/or Erlang: they’re really refreshing and mind blowing.”
I’d be interested in what Sergio has found in Erlang and Clojure that wasn’t “just a matter of good programming practices”.
Hi Matt,
you can surely program almost everything in Java, Scala, Clojure and Erlang: I’m not saying Clojure or Erlang will let you write programs that you can’t write in Java or Scala.
That’s exactly my point indeed: to me, Scala looks just like a more modern Java, with nice features but lots of additional, annoying, syntax.
So, if I had to choose something different than Java, I’d go with Clojure and Erlang: concise, powerful and capable of making you *really* think differently.
When Java will get obsolete, I’ll go with Scala or whatever, no problem with that: but as of now, that didn’t still happen, so I’ll keep Java as my first language and invest my time in learning something really different and appealing … at least IMHO ;)
Cheers,
Sergio B.
Hi Sergio
I have a friend (who I really respect) who came to the same conclusion as you did, i.e. you can combine Erlang with Java and get a very good result instead of using Scala. He also noted that the improvements Scala offered were mostly syntactic sugar.
True or not, I think Java and Erlang are just too crude for humans to work with. I used to dream about Ruby, but since the lack of static typing and poor performance I knew I would not be able to build the applications I wanted with it.
I tend to see Scala more as a mix of Ruby and Java than a mix of Java and Erlang. The extra abstractions (mixin) will help you to enforce DRY, so this can not be considered sugar in any way.
Another way to reduce bugs is to enforce immutability, something that is built into the core of the language.
The reason why I reel away from Erlang and Clojure is that these languages choose the functional paradigm over the object oriented. This is IMO not natural for humans, since most natural languages follow the S V O pattern (Subject Verb Object).
* Object oriented language: someone eat banana (SVO)
* Functional language: eat someone banana (VSO)
Does it make any sense?
hi,elegant apple in your post,I love thatelegantapple,I need to find one for me,jane
“MacOSX is my operating system of choice: it’s UNIX, it works pretty well and is beautifully shaped too!
Anyways, prior to choosing Apple, I used Linux for several years: I’d never, never, use Windows.
Small picture ” – wow! windows…here in philippines, we’re using windows…What is with apple?