Non-Symbolic Languages

Gilad Bracha writes...

Java was actually designed to have tuples from the start, but they never quite got in. At one point, I tried to add a tuple-like construct as part of JSR-65. We wanted to extend array initializers to full blown expressions. Eventually, that effort got quashed; I didn’t really resist, since the extension was painful, as such things always are in Java. We should have just done straight tuples as a separate construct - but at the time, that was frowned upon too.

This is because Java's syntax and the better part of its semantics are derived from the C family. Ironically Java is essentially a "symbolic language" underneath (i.e. the implementation is derived from the Lisp/Smalltalk family.)

Arguably both of these choices increased Java's popularity. Unfortunately the choice of syntax and semantics has stunted Java's expressiveness and will never overcome that beyond incremental improvements.

Update

I am asked in a comment what I mean by "symbolic language". I could have written "dynamic language". Essentially I mean the languages that have evolved from or were greatly influenced by the original Lisp implementations from the 1960s. The "symbolic" part goes back to Lisp's fundamental data types: symbols and lists (or symbols). Of course it has numbers and all kinds of data types now, but originally Lisp was intended for manipulation of symbols more than numbers, and so was called a "symbolic language".

End

Rotten Apple

Katie Dean wonders "if Apple lost Jobs"...

Apple has said that Jobs knew of backdated option grants but "was unaware of the accounting implications," and an internal investigation cleared him of misconduct.

Hypothetical satire follows...

Steve Jobs: "Gee, yeah, I knew we were backdating stock options to ideal dates where we could capitalize on changes in stock price that already occurred in order to enrich ourselves, but... you mean to say there is a problem with that?"

AlgoKit

Like Process One, Joel Reymont is also going at it with Erlang (and OCaml)...

AlgoKit is the high-frequency automated trading platform that I’m developing in Erlang.

My focus is futures and I’m not planning to use technical analysis. I want to capture and replay ticks, build a “Depth of Market screen” in software and make it simple to write, test and execute strategies that rely on volume, market delta and depth of market. Once the trading bot is ready I want to be able to co-locate it near the exchange, run it 24/7 and monitor it remotely via web or instant messaging. I’m after low to ultra-low latency so performance is definitely something I keep in mind...

I can receive a market quote, make a decision, execute a trade and receive a comfirmation within 5-10ms if I co-locate near the exchange. I would need to monitor the health of my algorithms, though, and would want to receive periodic updates. Erlang has both a web server and a Jabber/XMPP server so I can modify parameters of my algorithms using a web browser and check up on things via instant messaging...

The ideal solution is to marry the best of Erlang with the best of OCaml and write the algorithms themselves in OCaml while receiving market data from Erlang and feeding trades back to it for execution. AMQP and RabbitMQ (written in Erlang!) may just be the connection.

Outer Limits

Mickaël Rémond writes in the Process One blog how they are taking ejabberd to the outer limits...

At Process-one, we have always been performance freaks. ejabberd is without a doubt one of the most scalable XMPP server around and we have a strong reputation among our customers...

Angie is our internal codename for our program to move ejabberd to gigantic scale and make it able to support millions of users in a single domain...

We have reached 600,000 simultaneously connected users in benchmark, but we now want to increase the performance to be able to pass the 1 million users mark on the same hardware (We can probably go further, but we would need more machine).