Call with David Ungar (2015) [video]

Can somebody with a lot of money please regularly give a bunch of it to Dave Ungar, so he can keep doing what he wants to do? He has generated so much value on so many levels, that's so important and useful to millions of people and companies on a daily basis.

I wrote this in 2006 (a couple years before V8):

I just ran into Dave Ungar (of Self fame), and mentioned how ironic it was that JavaScript pointed to Self as its inspirational prototype (vis-a-vis JavaScript's prototype based object system), but JavaScript totally missed the boat on efficient compile-ability, which is the most interesting thing about Self. (I mean, anybody can make a prototype oop system that runs slow, but it takes a fucking genius to come up all the brilliant stuff in Self, like the aggressive inlining compiler (it has no byte code interpreter, just a bad-ass compiler), incremental compilation, polymorphic inline cache, coupled with dynamic de-optimization to make it debuggable). He gave a cool Self demo of writing a straightforward factorial function, then editing the source to the system's multiplication operator, so it would return a different result if you multiplied something by 1,000,000. Then he showed how it affected the factorial function, as well as the rest of the system, which incrementally recompiled itself as needed. All that and perfect debuggability, too! About JavaScript, he retorted that it was actually possible to efficiently compile JavaScript if you were really devious enough. Too bad the art of designing languages so you don't have to be devious in order to compile them, was lost of so many popular bad language designers (PHP, JavaScript, Perl, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)

A Conversation with Bjarne Stroustrup, Carl Hewitt, and Dave Ungar

They have a fascinating (and polite, respectful) argument about shared memory, message passing, locks, synchronization, and lock free message passing!

https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation-with-...

What happens when you put three titans of programming language design and computing in a room and turn a camera on to capture what takes place?

That's the thought experiment that led to this conversation with C++ language creator Bjarne Stroustrup, Self language creator Dave Ungar, and actor model creator Carl Hewitt. Thank goodness all three of them were present at Lang.NEXT 2014. Many topics are covered, as you can imagine. It's best that you find some quality time to watch, listen, and learn from some true masters. This is a long conversation and there is great programming history herein!

This is a rare (and very candid) gathering of some of the best minds in the programming world today.

Huge thanks to Bjarne, Carl, and Dave for spending over an hour to make conversation in real time. The topics naturally evolved out of the random and it was an honor to be in the room with such wonderful people who've had such a huge impact on programming.

Tune in. Enjoy.