Fortress is released | Hacker News Reader

Fortress is released

projectfortress.sun.com

16 pointsdfranke14 comments

Is this interesting? I tried to find out on the fortress project page linked above, but all I could quickly glean was that it requires Java, and it's intended specifically for HPC, with support for some concurrency primitives.

Same song, nth verse, waste of time and no better than the first?

One reason it's interesting is that Guy Steele designed it and has been working on it for years.

Edit: For anyone who finds this insufficient, Guy Steele's "claim to fame" is that he "co-wrote the specification of the Java programming language". So there.

http://research.sun.com/minds/2005-0302/

He already had a claim to fame by the time he worked on Java - as someone who did a ton of the Common Lisp standardization work.

Bah. He co-wrote the Java specification. Co-wrote!

and invented Scheme.

Guy Steele's "claim to fame" is that he "co-wrote the specification of the Java programming language"

actually, I think most people around here would be well advised to look at the author of CLTL and note that instead.

I suppose you're entitled to that opinion but it's not what the article says.

"Since we switched to Java, productivity at our firm has quadrupled, just because Java is catching our mistakes."

Quadrupled!

Is this an April Fool's joke?

What were they programming in before Java? Brainfuck?

Not in the April Fool sense, but the article is pretty much a joke. It actually says that - and that Steele's claim to fame is that he co-wrote the Java spec.

That's like saying Stevie Wonder's claim to fame is "I Just Called To Say I Love You".

That was a very subtle joke over the span of several years if so... I fell for it hook, line, and sinker with all of the easy mathematical notation. It preyed upon my desire for a language that would typeset and parallelize itself, so that I didn't have to run around with a hodgepodge of R, Python, and LaTeX to get my work done :-)

That's like saying Stevie Wonder's claim to fame is "I Just Called To Say I Love You".

Forgot to mention yesterday -- this is an awesome analogy -- I hope you don't mind that I will be beating it to death in presentations from now on ;-)

Ha, that's cool! I originally thought of Paul McCartney and Wings, but the Java analogy requires that the later, inferior thing be more successful than the earlier cool thing... besides which I am a strong Lennon/Harrison partisan and have deep issues against admitting that Paul was ever not a dweeb. Fortunately, Stevie came to the rescue.

Anyone who wants to play with some modern linguistic support for concurrency and not having bugs should check out Fortress, it has some pretty slick ideas for both

It is a strange language, but I've been wanting to study it for a long time. Thanks.

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