Alarming Development

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 best ever this year, with some interesting preliminary work that was more than just metaphors and hand waving. Jonathan Aldrich’s Plaid language is worth following. Continue reading “OOPSLA report”

Here is a video of my Onward talk.

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. Continue reading “The Eclipse of Java”

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 subtleties of trees in my last 4 papers. And the reviewers seemed to have struggled as well. My conclusion is that these trees are standing in the way of progress, and they have to come down. Continue reading “Lost in the forest”

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 OO programming, and eliminating a lot of the boilerplate in Java. I would consider Scala for my own work, except that it depends on Java for UI, which is an epic failure. But for server-side programming Scala is a promising alternative to Java.