Cadence and Smalltalk, Sun and Cincom

So, what the heck is going on over at Cadence? They've hired the Smalltalk/StrongTalk/Java-HotSpot wizard from Sun (Gilad Bracha) and a couple of key Smalltalk folks from Cincom. One of whom (Eliot Miranda, at least) is like Bracha, a very knowledgeable person at the compiler/hotspot optimization level.

Visual Works has a pretty mature compiler/runtime, but that has to be a loss.

Sun is just getting started with dynamic languages on the JVM... that seems like more of a loss.

And Cadence is hiring more Smalltalkers.

Interesting. Cadence has been one of the leaders in computer-aided electronics design for 15+ years. Way back when they were one of the first to incorporate a dialect of Scheme into their design tools. That led to or was closely associated with EDIF, the Electronic Design Interchange Format, based on Scheme/Lisp syntax. (Way better than today's XML, but... another day.)

Monothickic

The Pragmatic Dan Creswell (Dictator?) writes...

Java is getting heavyweight...

Java is designed to be dynamically extensible not monolithic and static as is the prevailing pattern pursued by Sun’s JDK development team and the world of J2EE. Remember, Java in it’s early days was all about code-downloading and dynamic extension...

To Schwarz, Sun and the Java masses, stop leading Java down the path of static, ever-larger, monolithic bloatware.

It's Mainframey!