My presentation at tekzone went well. I found it very difficult to introduce this panel discussion in just 15 minutes. Based on the comments I got, I seem to have succeeded… The presentation will be available for download. I tried to show that there were a lot of languages before Java that have a strong influence on the languages that will come after Java (Lisp, Smalltalk, Haskell were the prototypical examples). The key point (one I also tried to bring up in the discussion) is that programmers should always look beyond the language they currently are using.
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