Category: General

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 I usually have negative things to say here, so I wanted to note an example of something positive. Jeremy’s work is Computer Science that is imminently relevant to practicing programmers. I think gradual types are an inevitable feature of future programming languages.

For some time now people have been talking about web browsers as an application platform that supplants the PC. So called “Rich Internet Applications” use JavaScript or Flash or Silverlight to provide an attractive user interface (unlike HTML) close to that of traditional PC apps. JavaScript has been recently getting more attention because of some new VM’s that dramatically increase its performance (i.e., TraceMonkey, SquirrelFish, and V8). Dan Ingalls gave a talk at CUSEC about the Lively Kernel, which is a Smalltalk-style environment for JavaScript, running completely inside the browser. He was initially concerned that JavaScript is just a toy language, but in the end concluded that it is “good enough”. That prompted me to take a closer look. Continue reading “JavaScript is good enough”

Just got back from CUSEC . I got an interesting view of the current state of the programmer subculture. It is much more social than in my day. There is a whole culture of meetups, *-camps, and little conferences. Ruby seems particularly cool right now. Almost everyone had a Mac. Doing open source counts a lot for street cred. Continue reading “Observations of programmers in the wild”

I have been invited to speak at CUSEC. Looks like a fun conference, and some of the other speakers are interesting, like Dan Ingalls and Avi Bryant. My talk is Iconoclasm for fun and profit. Abstract: Continue reading “Speaking at CUSEC”

I have spoken before of the need to rebrand Subtext. It is stereotyped as a Visual Programming Language, and as such will never command respect. Using a non-textual code rep violates everyone’s expectations for how programming is done, and even how we write about it. The really fundamental problem is that I have been trying to solve problems that people don’t know they have, or won’t admit they have. No one is willing to admit they aren’t smart enough to program with current languages. Continue reading “At this juncture …”