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Original Post: Tuesday: Dynamic Language Symposium
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Today, I spent most of my time at various "Dynamic Languages Symposium" events. The DLS was something that Roel Wuyts (Star Browser guy to the Smalltalk world) has championed with the support from a lot of others. Usually at each OOPSLA, I find myself feeling "aha that was the big thing that alot of people were excited about this year." At this point, I'd have to pick the DLS. I don't have the writing patience to put down all the thoughts, or do justice to the many good utterances today.
The Symposium started with an introduction by Roel. Motivation is to get DL people talking. We have different ways and different emphases, but historically, we've actually learned lots from each other. That needs to continue to happen. It was a smallish room actually, and it was SRO.
The first talk was given by Gilad Bracha (Strongtalk, Self, etc). This was such a superb talk. He spoke of the needs of software programs today, to be malleable and updateable and fungible. He gave some examples of stuff that doesn't work well. Outlined somewhat of a vision. Talked about some of the various aspects of various DLs that are good stepping stones to getting there. At one point, somebody made the point that Lisp did this kind of stuff 30 years ago. Gilad had a very poignant reply. Yes he knew that Lisp (and Smalltalk he added) did these kinds of things many years ago. But his belief was that no one really cared, because they weren't issues in the programs of the day. These things are becoming issues now though, and we need to be their with DLs to fill the gap, both with what we have and making them better. Or maybe put another way, what these DLs are particulary good at doing is something that only now are people beginning to care about.
There were then some papers. I stayed to hear one by Pascal Costanza about "layers". One about AmbientTalk (research language, based on Scheme, uses mirror methods and extends the concept to attempt to deal with asynchronous issues). Marcel Weiher on Higher Order Messaging.
After lunch, Sussman (of Scheme fame) gave a quasi-Keynote for the DLs. It was largley attended (bigger room for this talk). I admit, I didn't find it that engaging, and spent time figuring how to eject the CD programatically for VisualWorks on my PowerBook (hint: DRDevice is your friend and XCode isvery cool).
Back for more DLs papers. Listened to the head of engineering from Franz Lisp. Some study was done where some guy took 14 good Java programmers and 14 good C++ programmers and they were run on similiar projects. So this guy had 14 good Lisp guys (I didn't know there were that many left! grin) tackle the same problems. They did real well of course. Same speed. Same memory footprint as Java. Finished faster. What's particularly cool about Lisp is of course the Macros. To write an XSL/XML/whatever validator, they basically loaded the spec in, added parantheses around everything and then through macros out it to define a language about xml. Very minimal and expressive. The interesting thing about this guy's studies, is that his background is a Congitive Psychologist, not a pointy haired boss, or an introverted mathematician.
Finishing this event, was a talk by Brian Foote. It was briliant. Saturated with many well prosed humor points. The biggest travesty was that it was not captured on video tape. It was classic. Maybe we can get him to come give it at Smalltalk solutions. It was basically his 20 year introspection into why type systems were not helpful. At all. It was well received. Packed SRO. I wish I'd written down a number of the soundbites he had. One I liked that I heard after was uttered by Don Roberts: "I get the same sort of feeling from using a type system that I do from knowing that the cushion on the airplane can be used for a flotation device: it doesn't matter."
Had some suger provided by Sun afterwards. They're celebrating Java's 10th Birthday. Many snide comments deleted. And then hung out with some of the Cincom reps. Hats off to Cincom people (special mention to Suzanne Fortman) for continuing to bear the torch so well. I'm excited about Smalltalk Solutions.
BTW: How many people knew/know that Eric Clayberg (of WindowBuilder fame) has picked up the rights to support (develop?) VisualAge Smalltalk. This is good news. At minimum, it means the product will receive support. Who knows, it might even some development/improvement!
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