What are the characteristics of a good software engineer? It's a topic many people would argue endlessly about. This is not surprising given we are effectively living in the era of software alchemy. Some of the best programmers draw on strong scientific and engineering background and combine this with craft like coding skills in a virtuous feedback cycle. In this talk we explore the individual practices and techniques that can help bring out the engineer in you.

Common wisdom dictates that native languages are the only means of building high-performance applications. How do managed runtimes such as those available to .NET, Java, and even JavaScript, yes even JavaScript compare? Many applications requiring high-performance are now developed for managed runtimes - such as financial trading, data stores and analytics, messaging processing, and even supercomputing.

Over the last few decades we have seen significant advances in managed runtimes, particularly for JIT compilers and garbage collectors. In this talk we will explore how our managed runtimes can equal, and even better in some cases, the performance of native languages.

Types, testability, tooling, paradigms, productivity, managed, native, concurrency, parallelism, performance, asynchrony, integrations, memory management, security, resilience, or, maybe, simple readability? What are the important things crossing the minds of language designers today as they build new languages or evolve the tried and trusted ones?

QCon convenes a panel of four language designers. These are people at the heart of questions like these. The computer science language panel is led by Martin Thompson and participants include:

• Brian Goetz (Java)
• Joe Duffy (Midori, C# Fork)
• Felix Klock (Rust)
• Sylvan Clebsch (Pony)

Come hear Martin ask the hard questions on choices made (past and future) and hear the discussion from the people behind some of the largest and most innovative languages in use by developers today.