This talk will explore Ballerina, a programming language pragmatically designed for cloud-native app development. It offers many features aimed at streamlining the creation, deployment, and management of cloud-native applications.

Sameera will begin the talk by examining how Ballerina integrates cloud concepts like services, clients, network interactions, and data formats directly into its language design. This unique approach is intended to smooth the development process in the cloud, removing the need to wrestle with complex concepts or difficult coding sequences.

The talk will then shift focus to Ballerina's flexible type system, exploring its use of open structural types. These types serve to ensure static typing in programs while also describing the network data format used in service interfaces.

Concluding the talk, attention will turn to Ballerina's graphical syntax, which provides a visually appealing and logical complement to its textual format. This feature allows developers a visually intuitive way to understand and build software flows using sequence diagrams. The talk will also delve into Ballerina's concurrency model, which merges sequence diagrams with language-managed threads, avoiding the usual complexities of asynchronous functions. By integrating explicit error handling, static types, and a concurrency model that overcomes traditional challenges—all within an accessible and clear syntax—Ballerina aims to facilitate the development of reliable and maintainable programs.