DeveloperWeek 2020

Ballerina is the next generation programming language, which redefined what means to be 'general purpose'. Historically, programming languages concentrated on single machine execution, in a controlled environment, and also for good reason, because any other external interactions were out of the scope of a programming language, at least in the bygone days that is. But now, the communication network is something that is always there, and software often doesn't work alone. But rather, they work more and more by communicating with each other to do something meaningful. So hiding this network from our code is no longer an option, and we try to use various frameworks and libraries get the functionality we need. Ballerina is a general purpose programming language, which has built its core concepts and functionalities to support creation of networked application. These features include the built-in support for services/resources, transactions, and resilient communication support, and also combines with a type system which further enhances these operations. In this session, we will go through Ballerina, in understanding the motivation behind this language, the features it introduces, and why it is a critical and timely addition to the tools and technologies we would need now.