Monday, December 30, 2002

Mozart. There's more than one virtual machine in the universe. The JVM is a pretty good one, for some (maybe a lot) of things. The CLR is good too. Here's another one: Mozart. I don't know much about the quality of its implementation, but I sure like the science behind it. What these guys are saying is that programming can be broken down into a basic set of concepts like state, objects, functions, constraints, and so forth. There are some pretty advanced concepts in the system -- first order functions, the constraint systems, and some very cool distributed stuff. They built a VM that could do all that. Microsoft's CLR was designed to run many languages, but is apparently particularly good (or only good, depending on your perspective) at running languages that look like C#. The Mozart VM seems like an attempt to substantially expand the capabilities of the VM, to push more into that base layer. This strikes me as the right approach. It turned out the RISC wasn't such a hot idea after all. I think we have the same situation in language design. The problem is that the VMs haven't been designed with any notion of theoretical completeness coupled with efficiency for a greater number of programming languages; languages that do more complicated things easily. 10:15:06 PM

Saving Milkmen. I wrote this a while back on Slashdot. Here's my take. The record companies are the milkmen of tomorrow. In the old days, milk was delivered door to door by milkmen. There was a certain convenience involved, but refrigeration, pasteurization, and the fact that you need to go to the grocery store anyway pretty much eliminated the need for them. They were optimized out of the process. Artists today make their money performing. A very tiny percentage of artists make significant money from their recordings. Total, open promotion of their music is really in most artists' best interest -- they can fill their shows with fans who'll pay $10 a ticket, and buy a T-shirt for good measure. In this world where fans listen to tons of different music for free, directly support their favorite artists, and creativity (rather than marketing) is rewarded, the record companies are...milkmen. Say goodbye. Here, though, the milkmen have enough money to buy friends. And to buy laws that keep them in business. Push back, whenever you can. When M'shell releases an MP3 for $0.99, how much of that does she get? When broadcasting rights are negotiated with online radio stations, where does the revenue go? 90% artist? Somehow I doubt it. Actors guilds have contracts that state the maximum amount an actor can pay an agent (10%). Great woe would become a record industry faced with an organized public, or organized artists. Deserved woe. :) In the mean time, GENERAL COMPUTATION IS AT RISK. Your right to make any program you'd like, for your own purposes, to explore Raymond's noosphere, is at risk. Milkmen want laws and circuits to keep them in business. 7:22:42 PM