DrupalCon Amsterdam 2019: Multilingualism makes better programmers - beyond PHP and JavaScript
Channel: Drupal Association
Date: 2019-11-02

Alexander Varwijk
GoalGorilla - Open Social, Enschede, Netherlands

One of Drupal 8’s leading goals was to “get off the island”. We’ve made huge strides in adopting PHP standards and including other libraries to replace custom built solutions. However, in the day-to-day live of a Drupal developer we only touch one or two programming languages. In my talk I want to continue our journey of leaving the island by showing interesting developments of other programming languages and how we can use what they’ve come up with in our own use of PHP and Javascript. While doing this I will also look ahead at the improved typing support that is part of newer PHP versions and the improved ergonomics surrounding functional programming.

Some examples of interesting habits and features in other languages that we could add to our toolkit: Rust’s borrow-checker and the mindset that it enforces; The Ruby community’s drive to create cheap short functions (instead of lengthy if-statements); Javascript’s use of codemods to make it easier to keep library consumption up to date when API changes in the library occur.