Programming Platform Growth: Table Stakes or Deal Makes?

This talk draws from Ed's 25 years of professional programming
experience, spanning many languages, operating systems, and platforms,
to survey what it takes to make a programming language platform
successful in terms of widespread use. Ed will look at Java, Python,
Node, Go, and Swift and evaluate the ingredients that brought each one
its own form of success. Finally, Ed will draw some lessons that apply
to anyone trying to grow their computing platform, because, at some
level, we are all in the platform business.

## Purpose of the Talk

IT practitioners are often faced with platform selection choices when
building solutions for their customers. The set of available choices is
always subject to lots of churn and chaos. This talk looks at what
separates successful platforms from others in terms of how each one
deals with technical and non-technical concerns.

## Target Audience

* Architect level developers who are faced with technology selection choices.

* Developers who want the platforms they are building to be successful.

## Audience Takeaway

Success is never an accident, and when it comes to programming platforms
thare are many checkbox-type things your platform must have to ensure
success. But implementing these things requires lots of grit,
determination, and polish.

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Ed Burns is a Consulting Member of the Technical Staff at Oracle America, Inc. and has worked on a wide variety of client and server side web technologies since 1994, including NCSA Mosaic, Mozilla, the Sun Java Plugin, Jakarta Tomcat and, most extensively, JavaServer Faces, on which he is the co-spec lead. Ed is also the co-spec lead for the Servlet specification. Ed is an experienced international conference speaker, with consistently high attendence numbers and ratings at JavaOne (Rockstar award winner 2016), Devoxx, DevNexus, JAOO, JAX, W-JAX, No Fluff Just Stuff, JA-SIG, The Ajax Experience, and Java and Linux User Groups. He has published four books with McGraw-Hill, JavaServerFaces: The Complete Reference (2006), Secrets of the Rockstar Programmers: Riding the IT crest (2008) JavaServer Faces 2.0: The Complete Reference (2010) and Hudson Continuous Integration In Practice (2013).