One of the emerging themes at this conference is the need to move “examples” (and their older siblings, scenarios and use-cases) “into the code,” so that examples/stories/scenarios/use-cases, which are tremendously meaningful to the subject-matter experts, are actually traceable directly into the code, which is tremendously meaningful to …

RIP John McCarthy. Truly one of the greats in our field.

This is Dart:

[sourcecode lang="JavaScript"]
main() {
try{
var x = 'foo';
int s = x;
print('Shirley, you are joking');
}catch(var e){
print('Surely this will be executed.');
}
}
[/sourcecode]

Note that I've declared s to be of type int and, just to make sure the point is clear, have assigned …

I should hope so.

This was the afternoon’s first major talk. David Ungar from IBM Research first demonstrated that the tragedy of Romeo & Juliet comes from a race condition (if only he had waited for news from the Friar).

That was excellent, but the real premise of his talk …

Perl users in our study performed notably poorly... no better than a language designed largely by chance.

They mean this literally, having used in their study a language called “Randomo”:

With the exception of braces, the lexical rule for variable names, and a few operators (e.g., addition, subtraction, multiplication …

I think when people saw that Dart was from Gilad Bracha and Lars Bak there was an expectation that Dart was going to be a grand synthesis: a blazingly-fast NewSpeak-with-curly-brackets. It’s very much not such a language. It doesn’t seem, academically, vastly innovative because it doesn’t add …

Gilad Bracha started the day’s Dynamic Languages Symposium with an invited talk on Dart, a new Web programming language (read: JavaScript replacement) in which “Sophisticated Web Applications need not be a tour de force.”

OOPSLA is attended by academics, who are typically less interested in the surface appearance of …

I am in Portland for OOPSLA / SPLASH, a conference that is my sentimental favorite. I think my first OOPSLA was in New Orleans circa 1990 and OOPSLA Vancouver 92 is filled with memories (mostly because Tina came and we dove Orcas Island in wetsuits).

OOPSLA is traditionally the big academic …

I read with interest, but disagree with, this take on why the software tools industry dwindled in the early 90s. Like most historical accounts, it tries to achieve a linear account of a historical rise and fall: there were a lot of compiler vendors because writing a commercial compiler was …

Between the high-revving manual transmission, the shave-the-door lanes, and the staccato "Turn left" instructions issuing from my iPhone GPS, driving here has a very XBox-ian feel to it. If you pretend the randomly located speed bumps are power-ups, the illusion is nearly perfect.

...

There are an astonishing number of taxis …