Sunday 5 December 2010

A very interesting conference of James Gosling

Happened on November 17, 2010, so it's really fresh. And the fact that Gosling has resigned from Oracle sometime ago and is still unemployed makes it free of a lot of corporate language.

One of the problem of most Fortran code is a) It's doing something really important b) The person who wrote it is probably dead.



Multicore. what can we do about it? What's the right thing to do with Hava? It feels like there's an unbounded supply of PHD thesis topics in there. The problem is that it has been a really rich source of PHD thesis topics for about 30 years.


One of the things about generics is that, you wander around the world, you talk to language designers, 15 years ago, and they would all say, Generics, really really good idea, you got to do it this way, but they all had a different version of this way.


I know that there had been some conversations between Google and Sun to do something early on, that was all just spectacularly weird(..).) Some sort of cooperation should have worked out a whole lot smoother than it did(...) It was weird. I'll leave it there.


(about CLR). They deleted all security feature to allow C pointers, because they wanted to do C. That's like the dumbest thing they have ever done. The instruction set, they added registers to it, that adds nothing, they just wanted to be different.(...) The biggest problem I have with the CLR is that they haven't put nearly as much energy on it(...) We were running at least a factor of two on almost everything. Their code generators are not very good, mostly because they were being lazy(...) Microsoft, in their harder parts, doesn't care about CLR that much because all their real meat and potatoes projects are not that. Word and such are still fundamentally big bags of C code. So they have not really had to depend on it for their own products.