In my ongoing conversations with Charlie Calvert over the past decade, I’ve been continuing to bring up the subject of simplifying programming, simplifying programming languages, simplifying programming paradigms. With all of the platforms, operating environments, programming languages, component libraries, class libraries, and tools, I still thirst and strive to make programming even simpler. OOP as […]
Multi-processing has been around for years. Special purpose languages (Occam, Linda, SISAL) have been created to take advantage of shared memory and parallel processing architectures in advanced computing systems. With the arrival of the IBM/Sony/Toshiba Cell Processor (to appear in the Sony PlayStation 3), Sun’s multi-core UltraSPARC T1 processor, and Intel’s Core Duo Processors on Unix/Windows NT servers, desktop […]
An August 11, 2005 posting on Slashdot led me to a question and long thread on the "ask Slashdot" forum. A teacher at Hong Kong International School asked the following question: "Does anyone out there have suggestions as to what would be a better language to start students with? Ideally one that might be more ‘enticing’ as well?" […]
I was reading a press release about the new Eclipse project focused on building a parallel tools platform. The project is headed by the Los Alamos National Laboratory. From the project home page, the goal is to "produce an open-source industry-strength platform that provides a highly integrated environment specifically designed for parallel application development.". You […]
Stan Kelly-Bootle, in his article in ACM Queue magazine, questions the use of the term "programming languages" to categorize the programming syntax we use to create applications. He says "many linguists consider programming languages to be the most egregious misnomer since the Big Bang (which I parochially date to 1949 when the Cambridge EDSAC I […]
I’ve been catching up on a backlog of magazine and book reading. An interview with Alan Kay (winner of the ACM Turing Award for 2003) in the December/January 2004-2005 ACM Queue magazine caught my eye. The title of the interview, "A Conversation with Alan Kay" appears on Pages 20-30. This ACM Queue magazine issue was […]
In Paul Simon’s song, The 59th Street Bridge Song(Feelin’ Groovy), he tell us to "Slow down you move too fast, You got to make the moment last, Just kickin’ down the cobble stones, Lookin’ for fun and feelin’ groovy". Well, I for one don’t want to slow down that often, especially when I am programming. […]
The TIOBE Programming Community monthly index lists the popularity of programming languages. The index is calculated each month using a Google and Yahoo web search (+" programming" -tv) and Google newsgroups searches for the last 12 months. The formula that is applied is #(normalized Google web hits) + #(normalized Yahoo! web hits) + #(normalized Google […]