The Great Static vs. Dynamic Debate

Jon Udell writes...

The designers of Parrot, the Perl 6 virtual machine, think not and have struck out on their own. "Why not compile to JVM/.Net?" the Parrot FAQ asks itself. And it answers: "Those VMs are designed for statically typed languages."

The irony about this is that the statically-oriented VMs are actually very dynamic-oriented under the hood. Techniques perfected for dynamic languages turn out to be just as beneficial for running static languages. The static language syntax just requires more hoops to jumped through to get to the dynamic features. Even C++ is an appropriate target for dynamic runtime techniques.

Static languages have been gaining more dynamic features for years... either by circumventing the type system as with Java and C#, or by strengthening the type system as with Haskell and ML.

One way or another, the future is dynamic.

To Fly or Disappear?

Jon Udell likens the trade-off of Internet anonymity or capability to the hypothetical choice of being able to disappear or to fly.

The evidence presented from This American Life suggests that first people choose to disappear, but soon switch to the ability to fly.

I think in normal American society (where normal to me means the society I've been a part of for the past 42 years) I would also choose the ability to fly.

But what if I were living in a more tyrannical society? Like Iraq? I certainly would choose to disappear for any number of reasons.

Rewriting Software Industry History?

Jason Matusow, the Shared Source Manager from Microsoft, via Phil Windley, would like you to know:

• Access to source code is not the primary concern for most people
• Having an option to work with the source code is important to few
• Few people who have access to the source code actually use it
• There is no "right" software development model.
• Much open source software has commercial interests.

Of course this list glosses over some other possibilities that might seem more viable if Microsoft had not illegally monopolized the software industry. People and corporations in the open source movement might prefer to market their software commercially at a fair price if there was fair competition. Investors might actually fund these ventures if they had confidence that there was some hope of a return.

I don't assume that all open source supporters are altruistic. They do seem to be realistic in today's software industry climate.

True Leadership is Too Rare

On Leadership: Dave Winer writes...

I recently read a history of the Civil War in the US. What a fucking mess that was. Sure a lot of piss and vinegar at the start. But the people in the southern US are still bitter about that war, 140 years later. A lot of people died, nasty deaths; and a lot of what people cared about was destroyed. All of us are too young to remember, that's why we have to study this stuff, and think about it.

I learned from Founding Brothers something I somehow missed in American History in high school. Slavery was clearly the most severe topic of discussion when the United States was founded, and many of the founders and first representatives had a fatalistic attitude that the issue would ultimately lead to a civil war.

Rather than face the slavery issue head-on, the government maneuvered to suppress discussion and preparation for any kind of acceptable transition. As Dave Winer points out, the result was a tragedy that has lingered to this day.

I believe an equally important issue that will have at least as great an impact and is the result of similar lack of real leadership in the government of the United States is playing out currently in Iraq. Today's issue is the lack of preparation for the inevitable post-oil economy.

Arguments that the present Iraq situation is not about oil can be convincing only if you take a short-sighted perspective. The need for planning a post-oil economy has been apparent since the 1960s, or certainly since the 1970s oil crisis.

Ideology, dogmatism, demogoguery, monied favoritism, greed, sloth, and celebrity have led us down a path of until now opaque crisis.

We should all pray for true leadership to emerge, be recognized, and be effective. Post haste.

XML: What should be native?

A discussion is taking place on this at Lambda the Ultimate. I wrote...

Agreed that programmers have to deal with XML and require better support for that.

I'm not sure what should be made "native". We're still learning about XML and related standards like XSLT, XPATH, XML Scheme, Relax NG, etc.

This is another situation where an extensible language like Lisp or Scheme, or a dynamic language like Smalltalk, can be applied without overcommiting the core language designers into decisions that make sense today but perhaps not tomorrow.

Transparent Code

Phil Windley relays thoughts on transparent code. Truly transparent code is not easy to come by and is rarely taught.

One of the great ideas in Extreme Programming are the concepts of shared code to eliminate ownership, simple rules for making code transparent, refactoring to improve it, and pair programming to encourage learning and cooperation.

XML and regexp

Jon Udell writes about text, code, data, and XML. Like Tim Bray, another software master, Ward Cunningham, uses simple regexps to parse HTML tables in his fabulous FIT test framework.

While we're at it, Wiki syntax itself is Ward's answer to the complexity of HTML (XML). With FIT he invented a simple table notation for Wiki.

Attention: This RSS Feed Changing Due To Blogger Bugfix

If you are a subscriber to this Making It Stick RSS feed, please update your RSS feed according to the URLs on the blog page. They recently changed with a bug fix from blogger.

Thanks -Patrick

XML Programming?

Tim Bray writes XML is too hard for programmers, including:

You can embed SQL in most languages now, but normally you don't implement any serious business logic in it. If this hasn't happened after decades in the relational world, why would we expect it to happen in the XML world?

One problem with SQL is exactly that it has been embedded in most languages. The result is a continuing dichotomy between "in memory" data structures and objects and "on disk" relational tables. I'm surprised no popular language has better incorporated declarative query and update capabilities into the language definition itself.

This level of integration could cement XML formats into systems development. Tools like InfoPath and XML integration into front office tools will not be sufficient if programmers must continue to straddle an XML and procedural language gap.

XML syntax strikes me as a reasonable notation for information interchange. I am not convinced that XML per se should be built into the core business rules of our systems. The essence of a new systems architecture though should have these characteristics:

Semi-structured

Capable of handling formal definitions when present, along with reasonable behavior for fuzzy data by supporting human interpretation and increasingly higher-level artificial intelligence capabilities.

Dynamic

Definitions and behaviors must be modified on-the-fly without breaking existing capabilities, forcing complete re-releases of products, or requiring extensive regression testing.

Domain-specific

Significant definition and behavior modifications must be within the grasp of professionals in the system domain, i.e. non-computer science majors.

Programming in XML from Java or C# using mechanisms like threads, monitors, and two-phase commit transaction protocols are not going to cut it. And neither is a mere syntactical embedding of XML and DOM into these languages with the same old complexities.

Florida to Rejoin the Empire?

British Dissent Over an Iraq War Imperils Blair's Political Future By ALAN COWELL

Tony Blair's destiny seems entwined with Security Council developments and with the nature of any military campaign in Iraq.

Take a look at this layout.

Take a look at this layout.

Grooving on the War on Liberty?

Interesting questions on Rick Klau's weblog:

The far more interesting question for me: what are the implications of Microsoft being among the largest shareholders in a company that is providing domestic surveillance software to the Pentagon? And who raises this kind of bubble money in today's economy?

George W. Bush's press conference

John Robb conveys George W. Bush's press conference yesterday, including:

9/11 awoke the US to the threat of terrorism...

Shame on us for being asleep the first time the WTC was bombed in 1993.

The UN, as an organization that promotes collective security, is not working. Here's why:

1. The UN sponsored inspections of Iraq have not worked over 12 years.
2. The unanimous acceptance of UN resolution 1441 last September stated that this was the last chance for Iraq to disarm.
3. Given that Saddam's Iraq continues to flout the inspections and the UN's will, the UN seems unable to bring closure on this issue.

The problems I have with this are that during these years:

• The inspectors announced when they were voluntarily pulled out that the inspections were not working. Nothing was done back then.
• Vice Preseident Cheney as the the head of Haliburton was raking in millions of $USD rebuilding Iraq's oil capabilities, not to mention Iran and Libya.

Little Smalltalk

I recently stumbled upon Little Smalltalk which I had not thought about in well over a decade. It is a nice little interpreter good for learning the simple basics of object oriented programming as well as how to simply implement an interpreter for such a small but capable language. The Little Smalltalk book is a nice short read too.

WS Referral

Phil Windley continues his look at various Web Service related specifications. The latest is WS Referral.

I am in search of some kind of "best practices", which will be difficult since these are new specs and may never have been used in real-world scenarios.

The simplest thing that could possibly work is:

• I publish a web service.
• You call it.

Everything I want to do regarding asynchronous processing, security, transliterating for whatever reason should be possible behind the facade of a simple web service API.

Email me with ideas where this wouldn't work and WS Referal would fix the problem.

Distributed Event-Based Architecture for Web Services

I would like to read this article, "Build asynchronous applications with the Distributed Event-Based Architecture for Web Services", at IBM DeveloperWorks..

I think IBM wants me to read it too. They sent the URL in a DeveloperWorks email. But where is the article? Google doesn't find it either.

A marvelous time *not* to have to be an XML guy

Jon Udell writes the most intelligent idea about the web I've read in a long time...

It's also, I hope, about to become a marvelous time not to have to be an XML guy. Drag an URL onto your universal canvas. An object materializes. You can hand it to your friends. It can do useful things. Angle brackets? Nowhere in sight.

Wanted: Better concurrency models than monitors

I sparked what is turning into a lively discussion on concurrency models in programming languages on the langsmiths Yahoo group.

Have RSS?

Testing for RSS feed.

I'm looking for my previous audience... where are those five giys? I used to have five guys who actually read my old blog. If that's you, I'm now here. Why? (1) I'm not ready to give up on Google. They've not flipped the bozo bit on me yet. I want to try Blogger. (2) I want to try blogging and aggregating with something other than Radio. I wanted a different aggregator anyway, and moving the Radio client to a new computer was more trouble than it was worth. (3) Those five readers of my old blog will find me if they want to. They did the first time, and I had nothing to offer then either. 8^) So I'm gonna make this one stick. For a while at least.