Does language choice even matter in the AI era?
In this panel, we bring software practitioners and academics together to discuss language relevance in the AI era.
If AI generates, refines, and tests code, does our choice of programming language still matter? If an automated "software factory" can synthesize features end-to-end without (much) human supervision, shouldn't every system be written in Zig, Rust even straight to Assembly to maximize performance and minimize infrastructure costs? Or, conversely, is language choice even more critical because it directly impacts code correctness and much needed developer & agent comprehension?
Host: Krzysztof Romanowski
Martin Odersky is the creator of the Scala programming language and a professor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. He is also the founder and chairman of the Scala Center. His research interests include programming languages, type systems, and compiler technology. At EPFL, he leads the Programming Methods Laboratory, where he implements the cutting-edge research ideas into the Scala programming language.
Nada Amin is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Harvard SEAS and Associate Faculty at the Kempner Institute, where she combines programming languages (PL) and artificial intelligence to build intelligent systems that are correct by construction. Before Harvard, she was a University Lecturer in Programming Languages at the University of Cambridge and a member of the Scala team at EPFL, where she completed her PhD. Earlier, she was a software engineer at Google and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from MIT. She recently co-founded Midspiral to bring verification to mainstream AI-assisted software development.
I am a member of the Typelevel community and a core maintainer of several projects, including Cats Effect. I also serve as the Executive Director of the Typelevel Foundation, where I help grow our community and support industry adoption of our libraries. I am interested in functional programming, concurrent runtimes, and how community and technology interact in open source :) ask me how you can get involved with Typelevel!
I am the co-founder of SoftwareMill, head of R&D at VirtusLab, where I primarily generate code using Java, Scala, Rust and other interesting technologies. I am actively involved in open-source projects, such as Ox, Jox, Tapir, sttp, and others. I have also been a speaker at major conferences, including JavaOne, Devoxx, GeeCON and ScalaDays.
In addition to writing closed- and open-source software, I spend my free time exploring various programming-related subjects. Any ideas or insights I gain usually end up with a blog (https://warski.org/articles).
Krzysztof is Head of Developement Productivity @ VirtusLab, where he manages teams creating world-class developer’s tooling (mainly focused on LLMs, Bazel and IDEs), and maintaining core parts of the Scala ecosystem. As a developer, Krzysztof specialised in Developer tooling for Scala, like Scala CLI.