Kill Java

Some people apparently want to kill Java. Hey, I am not entirely against that idea, but it should be deliberate.

In this case, some people want to continue adding to Java until it becomes nothing by trying to be everything. Java is essentially what it will be. Yeah, generics, closures, etc. are arguably helping or hurting depending on the situation... that's not what I am talking about. Read on from Paul Browne...

Now that you have Java in your open source toy bag, can I have Duck Typing please?

Yeah, right. Do you understand either Java or duck typing?

P.S. I still want to keep compile time type checking to make sure I don’t make any mistakes.

OK. Apparently not.

Here you go: if you want Java and duck typing, use Jython or JRuby or Rhino/Javascript or...

Do not add duck typing to Java. Ever. Period. End of sentence.

Today's Englebartian Shake Up

This proclamation from bit-tech.net...

DirectX 10 is probably the most important revolution in games development, at least since the introduction of the programmable shader in DirectX 8.0. Because of the way that Microsoft has designed the new driver model, DirectX 10 will only be available for Windows Vista users and there will not be a version released for Windows XP. Along with DirectX 10, Windows Vista will come with DirectX 9.0Ex – this is because pre-DirectX 10 hardware will not work under the new API due to the complete overhaul.

Of course Wii disagree. Everyone expects graphics to get better on all systems, this is not just a Vista thing.

The *true* Revolution is how the Wii's remote controller changes forever the human-machine experience at $250 USD complete. You may not like gaming, you may like Sony more than Nintendo. Nevertheless, Nintendo has taken human-machine interaction in general to an entirely new *practical* level for everyone.

This is an Englebartian shake-up.

Sorry. That's just the way it is. Period. End of sentence.

Nothing Is All Or Nothing

(via Stefan Tilkov)

A sorry commentary on the state of the software industry from Steve Jones...

SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft... These are the companies who your CIO goes to visit and sits through dinners and presentations on their product strategy, and what they are pushing is WS-* in all its ugly glory. This means that in 3 years time you 100% will have WS-* in your company, in a company you work with, or in a company you want to work with.

Don't worry about WS-Dominance. It will never arrive. But beware of WS-Stupidity.

Having some large software vendor or partner inject SOAP into your data center is no reason to allow it to infect all of *your* work. Push WS-Complexity out to just those edges whose outside forces require it. Stop the enemy at the gates. Make the rest as simple as possible. Always assert your control over your own architecture or you will be a loser.

That's what we're doing anyway. We have a CIO that believes in smart people, incremental development, and lasting systems.

Yow. More Wii Fun

Maybe you're tired of my just blathering about the Wii. My son's been bogarting that Wii, but I reached another milestone with it last night. We played doubles in Wii sports. That another level of gaming fun that I don't believe can be matched with any other system.

Sorry Microsoft. Sorry Sony. The Nintendo Wii is the best thing in gaming in the last 20 years, and you have a ton of work to do to catch up.

Last night my son and I bowled, played tennis, golfed, etc. And not with some artificial hand held, buttony, doo-dah thing.

We were actually swinging rackets, clubs, putting spin on a bowling ball with our wrists, and playing *together*.

Yow. The experience playing with others is even so remarkably more amazing than playing solo.

Just In Time For Christmas

Everyone needs this combination under the tree... sexbuntu and christianbuntu!

If only Rev. Ted Haggard had known about these.

Design and Execution

I'd like to see Nintendo and Apple compare notes. Two brilliant design and execution companies that would appear to complement each other well.

Meanwhile the XBox 360 is ho-hum, Microsoft blows Vista, blows "Zune" (ugh - even the name), and blows yet again their understanding of open source. Ballmer, with little to do apparently in actually *leading* a company, can only resort to threatening Linux.

My prediction -- Novel is not the next SCO. *Microsoft* is the next SCO. Albeit with billions more in the bank -- they are a company desperate for what they've never been:

-- a design and execution company.

Wii in the House

The Wii is in the house. Game Crazy had a midnight event just for the people who pre-ordered. So we got there way early, played the demo Wii, and hung out with a small number of excited employees and customers.

We got the Wii, an extra wiimote controller, a classic controller, four additional games (plus the sports game that comes with the box), some online points for classic games, etc. for a good $50+ USD under the base price of the PS3.

And on top of that we have an amazing game playing experience. Using the wiimote controller is like no other human-machine interaction I've experienced. Feel the gentle "bump" as you traverse from option to option in a dialog, e.g. while building your online characters in the "Me Channel".

Something I learned now that I've played a good bit more since my first experience a few weeks ago: driving with the controller is something like the steering wheel, but the more I "drive" with it, the more I find myself balancing the controller in my hands and tilting the weight of it one way or another to keep the truck on course. This is not really a steering wheel, but close -- it is more of a natural analog for the truck's movement on the screen. More natural than a joy stick -- there is a "feel" for the movement, gently letting the fairly lightweight controller tilt around.

Easy. Smooth. Awe inspiring... you may be a fan of the multiple processors displaying all the PS3 graphics (although I have yet to hear of a purchaser who did not sell their purchase on ebay), but I have trouble imagining someone not coming away from a session with the Wii not thinking this is a big step toward a new style of machine interaction.

Nintendo knocked this one *way* out of the park. The feel is generations ahead of the 360 and I imagine the PS3. Whatever the Wii lacks in graphics processing will surely catch up over time with hardware and software improvements. At $250 per box, I can easily buy another box next Christmas with more graphics and still be on par with the initial cost of the competitors. Nintendo made the right investments.

Diesels

Ralph Johnson writes...

...the Lisp people have been making DSLs for 20 years. I learned about them about 20 years ago, and the Lisp people had been doing it for 20 years before that, so I think they have been doing it for 40 years. Neverthless, DSLs are only starting to become a hot topic.

He also recommends Martin Fowler as a source (written and seen/spoken) for more information and suggests...

These are ideas that need to become ubiquitous.

Visualizing Grammars

Nick Sieger created graphs of the grammars for Ruby, Java 1.5, and Javascript. The Ruby grammar was created from parse.y from the original C implementation. I'm not sure what he used for the other two, i.e. whether they are from "real" grammars.

Nick notices the primary node as the center of complexity for the Ruby grammar. I wonder how a more incrementally derived, top-down parser might distribute that complexity, e.g. one built for a "packrat parser".

Multitasking Meetings

Apparently McGovern's enterprisey approach to enterprises is everybit the equal of his enterprisey approach to software. There is at least one large semicondictor company that has yet to learn Jame Robertson's counter-lesson...

If you spend time multitasking in meetings, then the correct answer is that you don't need to be in those meetings. Full stop, period.

Thing is, it used to be that company's culture to eschew this symptom. Every employee was trained in a *required* "Effective Meetings" course to question their role in each meeting they're invited to. Years have passed since I saw that practiced at all widely.

Naming Conventions

According to this, my stripper name is:

Dinger Cherrywood

...and my Star Wars name is

Patlo Baday

Some Other Wii Pictures

Some more pictures from playing the Wii last Monday...

The Wii is Alive -- My Hands On

A sighting (via James Robertson).

But hey, I got my hands on one last Monday. I played WarioWare. My son and a friend played that, plus whatever that off-roading game is, the sports that come with the Wii, and, after the two of them gathered signatures of others in the room(!) they petitioned the Nintendo guy to go to his car and get Zelda / Twighlight Princess. And they were rewarded (see my somewhat fuzzy image).

All I can say is, well, the kids took to the Wiimote controller like they'd been playing for years. I took a little more effort because I don't really play many games even with today's controllers. But the Wiimote controller really is going to make me want to play more games.

The Wii is definitely going to be the system to have this holiday season.

Game Changer

David Berlind on "Why IBM’s patent suit against Amazon could be bad news for the entire Web"...

IBM's patent infringement suit against Amazon is the equivalent of Big Blue saying "Excuse me everyone, we've got something very important to say." Very important indeed if you own or operate a Web site with advertisements on it.

One way or another this deal seems destined to change the game. Which game?

It could change the Internet or at least "internet commerce".

Or it could change the patent game by realizing programmers do nothing *but* innovate and we are bound to invent very similar, very basic mechanisms for a world which has never been inhabited.

Could a patent have ever been granted for "the wheel"? Under current law, apparently. But isn't "the wheel" considered a fundamental concept, almost a law of nature in the physical world?

Shouldn't "online advertisements" be considered a fundamental concept, almost a law of nature of life online?

Computer Science Doldrums

Andres Valloud writes...

Roger teaches Smalltalk at SDSU (as you can see from his link). Here are some interesting things I did not know...

Enrollment is way down, there are 4,000 students for about 10,000 places. Computer science, in particular, is down 40% since the dot com bubble bust. This figure is consistent with other campuses.

I can back this up with a recent visit my son and I made to another university's CS department. At least in some cases, CS appears to be in the doldrums. At this point my son is considering a CS minor, probably not a major.

For someone considering "applied computer science", i.e. programming, I think a minor is probably a good choice. Way back when I was in school programming had yet to make a wide and visible impact in most other disciplines. Programming has always embraced people from other backgrounds. I think the minor approach is an extension of that, and an acknowledgement that application in some domain is at least as dependent on domain knowledge as on programming knowledge.

Comment Moderation

I just noticed a backlog of comments to moderate going back to early October. I thought I'd checked since then. Anyway, I've been through the list. I apologize to folks who left comments several weeks ago, only to have them stall in my queue.

Ruby Might Be Sucking Less?

Update:

Ruby's primary new implementation may simply(?) have continuations temporarily out of order. I'm not sure that's a good sign, but OK.

Better to build continuation support in from the beginning, I'd think. There are more than 25 years of good papers discussing various strategies, and plenty of good implementations to borrow from.

End Update

I've heard some horrendous things about the current implementation of Ruby. But there is a new implementation more or less underway. But, yeah, let's don't do continuations. They're hard. And besides those VMs for real languages like Java's and C#'s don't do them. (Nothing to see here!)

And then Matz and Koichi dropped the bomb: Ruby 2.0 would support neither continuations nor green threads.

Besides what are continuations good for? Piffle.

And green threads? That just sounds sick. Who could imagine anything running well using non-native threads?

Seriously, Ruby is in dire need of a decent implementation. The JVM and the CLR are fine for what they are, old legacy. But Ruby needs its own *modern* implementation.

Lisp on the DS

A really interesting thread on the Gambit Scheme mailing list. Andrew Lentvorski is porting Gambit to the Nintendo DS handheld. He has a way to go, working on interrupts and threading. But the signs of life so far are really surprising to me at least.

Gambit ports fairly easily to Unix-like systems. The Nintendo DS does not strike me as a Unix-like system. Actually it turns out Marc Feeley has abstracted more than Unix out of the runtime system. He's had bare metal somewhat in mind but not much actual porting before this.

Something like Squeak Smalltalk ports to bare metal fairly deliberately. The core of Squeak is written in a subset of Squeak and implements a VM. Gambit on the other hand is a fairly aggressive optimizing compiler (and interpreter) written in C and Gambit Scheme and generates C.

The excercise is sure to enable other bare metal or nearly so ports of Gambit down the road. Which paves the way for anything riding on top of Scheme as well. As Andrew points out that includes Termite, but could go far beyond that over time.

Andrew has designs on using the Nintendo DS wifi capability. Gambit serializes continuations for the network. The possibilities multiply.

Emacs

Phil Windley knows...

If your editor isn't programmable, you're missing out!

Of Course

Nat Torkington in the O'Relly Radar gets the future about right...

Oh no, banks are still writing Java code—and their new programmers only want to use Smalltalk...

And there'll still be 5% of the marketplace saying of whatever new language is being created, "of course, this was first done more elegantly in Lisp."