Tuesday, December 17, 2002

Graham Glass. Graham reposted some of his articles recently -- if you haven't read them you probably should.  Go see his weblog.  He's one of the guys I've admired the most over the years.  I thought JGL was pretty damn cool, so a few years back I wrote a generic collections library for Delphi (called DeCAL) that adapted the STL/JGL model to Delphi.  It was a great exercise. The thing about container libraries is, they just never seem to be right in multi-threaded environments.  Threading is general just seems too hard to do right; there needs to be better structuring at the language level and organizational level.  Common threading patterns should be part of the language, not glued in. There are parallel computing languages that do this kind of thing.  It's too bad that we don't have a mainstream one, but maybe with the advent of .NET we will get there.  Or if Sun gets off its ass and evolves Java, like Graham says they should. 11:41:28 PM

MicrosoftWatch [via ScriptingNews]:  Box went on to call the development of a "data-oriented language" one of the "most interesting areas for innovation in the next five years."  Pardon me while I wipe the drool off my chin.  Hopefully, this new language will have explicit support for distributed operations.  Perhaps even along the lines of what I outlined in Neurotransmitters. Where can I sign up? [Sam Ruby] A data-oriented language?  We have one already.  It's called LISP.  Pick up Paul Graham's books and check it out again, if you haven't in some time.  LISP is just super cool and I can't for the life of me remember why I haven't done anything with it in so long.  I just wish LISP provided a little more structuring capability, and that it was easier to read... 11:37:38 PM