Author Archives: Jonathan Edwards
OOPSLA report
Back from OOPSLA, with mixed feelings. This was the smallest OOPSLA ever, and there are some big changes coming next year: they are renaming the conference SPLASH (Systems, Programming, Languages, Applications: Software for Humanity). OOPSLA becomes a colocated conference within the SPLASH umbrella, along with Onward and Dynamic Languages. The Onward program was perhaps the [...]
Posted in General 21 Comments
The Eclipse of Java
Java is the new Cobol. But there has been a burst of language innovation on the JVM, for example Groovy, Scala, and Clojure. These languages can not become mainstream without a first-class IDE like Eclipse. Eclipse may not be that IDE.
Posted in General 10 Comments
Lost in the forest
I am lost. The essential idea of coherence is a year old, and I still haven’t implemented it. I blame the trees. I have been struggling to integrate coherence with the tree-based model of computation in Subtext. It just isn’t working. In fact it hasn’t been working for years – I have struggled with the [...]
Posted in General 12 Comments
Scala is Groovy
Groovy’s creator endorses Scala. Scala is very promising. When I first read Odersky’s academic paper several years ago, I was put off by the complexity of the type system. But it becomes more attractive when you look at the everyday programming aspects of the language. It does a very nice job of synthesizing functional and [...]
Posted in General 9 Comments
Illustrative Programming
Martin Fowler has a new post in which he coins the term Illustrative Programming for what I have been calling Example Centric Programming. He gives me a nice plug too. Martin is a keen observer of trends in programming, and his terminological inventions have had an enormous influence on the practice of patterns, refactoring, and [...]
Posted in General 5 Comments
Wagn
Check it out. Cross between a Wiki and a database. And a semantic database at that, where all fields/attributes are binary associations. See plus cards and formatting. Very cute. Has an embedded query language, using JSON syntax. Needs an embedded update language.
Posted in General 6 Comments
Repenting Syntax
Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have been seduced by Syntax — by its offer of quick implementation shortcuts, and by its promise of easy acceptance into the establishment. All lies, leading to perdition! I cast you out, Syntax!
Posted in General 30 Comments
Semi-rejection
Onward has rejected my paper, but invites me to cut it in half and resubmit it. I feel like withdrawing the paper, but will probably swallow my pride.
Posted in General 13 Comments
Wave reflections
Google Wave is huge. I am not even going to try to assess it dispassionately. As I explained in my last post, the same epiphany hit me just a few weeks ago, so I have already drunk the Kool-Aid. Basically: email is the original killer app of the Internet. We live in email, but email [...]
Posted in General, Reviews 27 Comments
Curses, foiled again
For a long time I have been trying to come up with the “killer app” for my new programming paradigm. A few weeks ago I discovered it. As I thought it through, I started to panic, because I realized that it really was a killer app that didn’t need a new programming language. One could [...]
Posted in General 10 Comments
Steps Toward the Reinvention of Programming
Time for some mental Spring cleaning. This is the first of several reviews I plan to do on interesting current research. First up is Alan Kay’s Viewpoints Research Institute. As the title states, he wants to reinvent programming. Again. The guiding goal of the project is to recreate the “personal computing experience” – from OS [...]
Posted in Reviews 4 Comments
The Summer of Code
The time has come to stop writing papers and start releasing code.
Posted in Announcements, General 14 Comments
Coherence — The Director’s Cut
The Coherence home page is up at http://coherence-lang.org. The submitted version of the paper is there, with a new intro and a surprise ending.
Posted in General 11 Comments
What if Smalltalk were invented today?
To: Alan Kay
From: The Program Committee
Subject: FAIL
Dear Dr. Kay,
The program committee thanks you for the submission of your paper “Object Orientation – A New Paradigm of Programming”. Unfortunately your paper has been rejected. We had many fine submissions this year, but as you know we must accept no more than 15% of submissions to be [...]
Posted in AgitProp, General 33 Comments
Draft Onward paper
At long last, I have posted a draft of the paper I am submitting to Onward this year. Still pretty rough, but it is due a week from Monday, so I am pushing it out now to get feedback in time. Coherent Reaction. All comments welcome. What are the hard parts to understand? What is [...]
Posted in General 14 Comments
Gradual Typing
Jeremy Siek is doing some great work on gradual typing, and it may get incorporated into Jython. Here is a presentation, and a video. A similar idea is Gilad Bracha’s Pluggable Types. JavaScript 2 had planned to do gradual typing, though it is unclear if that will survive the collapse of the project.
It seems [...]
Posted in General 2 Comments
Incompleteness