Juergen Schmerder - Juergen has been working for SAP since 1999. In September 2007, he packed his stuff and moved from Heidelberg, Germany to the sunny Bay Area, where he joined SAP Research to work on the application of dynamic languages, in particular Ruby, to the SAP universe. Prior to that, he explored several groups within SAP as a software architect. Before joining SAP he learned about the SME market, working as a consultant for one of the ERP solutions that turned out to compete with SAP: Microsoft Navision. Somehow he managed not to loose his passion for simple solutions thoughout the nine years of working in a company as complex as he never imagined. Juergen holds a degree in Mathematics from the University of Augsburg, Germany, a California driver's license and a FC Bayern Muenchen membership. For those truly more interested in the talker than in the talk, he will have a CV available.
Dynamic languages like Ruby are getting more and more attention and have proven that they allow to build programs faster and more effectively in an agile environment than traditional strong-typed languages. Ruby has a great potential to become a next-generation application programming language. At least there is a wide-spread opinion, that whatever will be the next-generation language, it will be very close to what Ruby is today- Association for Computing Machinery