chwahoo

Maybe worth a look for you: https://github.com/orfjackal/retrolambda

Those VPN services better pony up to Verizon then. ;)

The article said that the site required Yale credentials to view the information.

With the mouse sidebar, I think you meant terminal velocity (not escape velocity).

I don't think that post makes the argument you're objecting to. The author was just noting that advocacy for the GPL's version of "software freedom" has been attacked in the past by Microsoft and in the present by Canonical using oddly symmetrical language.

To backup the original poster, one of OCaml's stronger communities focuses on program analysis for C programs (using the CIL library http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~necula/cil/) and SMT solvers like Z3 are also widely used in that community, so there's definitely some potential for confusion if your OCaml backend gains some traction.

Still, an LLVM backend for OCaml seems like a great idea. Keep up the good work.

For those that wonder what they're seeing, this book is about writing functional programs and proving them correct. This is done in the context of a dependently-typed language called Coq. An example of a dependent type is having a function that takes an integer value n and an array of size n as arguments and having the type system check that you call the function with a valid size and array at compile-time. It turns out that dependent types can be used in much more powerful ways, including proving deep correctness properties about programs (less powerful type systems (like Java's) are also "proofs", but the correctness properties they check are typically weaker).

Why would a semi-anonymous comment require guts?

If the author's open-source credentials are part of his argument, then he needs to make them part of the story he tells in his article. He shouldn't assume that people will connect the dots (he doesn't have the name recognition of a Torvalds or Stallman). Further, even with the context, I don't think the dots add up to enough of a picture to understand what he's arguing for/against.

To make a convincing argument, he should have made it clearer what he was arguing against ("the bazaar" is too nebulous and refers to many things, .com development refers to other things) and what he was arguing for (which was entirely missing, other than a reference to Brooks' book). If he doesn't have a clear vision of how development should work (or a "standard-bearer"), he should have at least provided some examples of things working the "right" way (or better).

He should probably also have left off a bunch of the insults and hyperbole: "clueless" / "hacks" / .com period a "disaster" for code quality. I'm frankly pretty surprised that ACM Queue would publish this.

Why does it matter who you are? I've tried to respond to what you wrote.

Why do you think most of the software we build now is like putting a man on the moon? I think it's nothing like that.

Maybe I should read Brook's book (I've enjoyed MMM), but your article doesn't make a strong case for it.

This article reads like an old timer feeling left behind by the current rate of progress who thinks that the problem is really that the rest of the world is doing it all wrong.

He's probably right that lots of software could be designed better, but I think he's wrong that that's of paramount importance. We need lots of software these days and we simply don't have the resources to built it to Kamp's standards. Also, we've learned that our requirements change so fast that his beautiful design would quickly be twisted into the pile of hacks that he hates.

He notes how long it takes to compile the software that runs on his work machine---how long would it take to compile the software on a windows machine? (Or whatever he would claim is the standard-bearer of his cause).

He also attacks open-source software. The truth is, we have an amazing amount of free and open source software available. Some of it may be flawed in design or usability, but it enables us to solve so many problems (and look at/modify the software when needed). I don't think that all software needs to be "free", but I do think free software has made us all much richer. I have a hard time seeing all this value that the Bazaar has created as inferior to slow-moving, centralized, big, up-front design development.

For most idealistic -isms, I doubt any implementation could exist that would satisfy the -ism's true believers (particularly since those implementations would have flaws that would need to be disclaimed).

Accepting Yegge's framework for purposes of this response:

Haskell is beyond conservative, but it does take great pains to try to address the reasons that people might want a more liberal language. However, it's often really painful to get that code to typecheck compared with the effort to get the same code correct in python or ruby. Sometimes Haskell is the worst of both worlds: it requires mind-bending reasoning to write "liberal"-like code, when the "conservative" guarantees you get in return aren't for very interesting correctness properties.

I'm starting to think my ideal language would be gradually-typed (something like Groovy): use static typing by default, but fallback to dynamic typing for the pieces that require superhuman effort to type correctly (unless you believe that the correctness guarantees from static typing pay off for the code you're writing--e.g., code in rarely exercised error handlers).

This doesn't match the text on the site: "If the ticket is found to be offered for resale above face value we may invalidate the barcode and refund the ticket price."

Hasn't Groovy always been a compiled language?

I found through Google right away by searching for the title--first hit.

I was only confused about your post :).

You can change the aperture in this simulation. Perhaps it was just grayed out since you were in shutter-priority mode?

> I bet this better C will arise in a few years at max, and it is not going to come from academia.

I take this statement to mean: Academia is failing us by not providing us with the next generation C. If that was the intent, I think it's not a fair jab.

Academia IS actively investigating low-level languages: ATS, Cyclone, and typed assembly are all examples. But, it's not academia's job to create widely-used languages and tools. Sometimes they do create something that achieves wide use, but that's mostly a side benefit. Their job is to generate and evaluate useful "idea nuggets" that can inform future system builders and to train students to do novel systematic research.

There seems to be a common meme that academic CS is "out of touch" with what real developers need. I think it's mostly unfair: while the world always needs a slightly better web framework, compiler, language, etc., that's not the goal of academic CS; they aim to fertilize the ground with ideas that facilitate the growth of more big and small ideas.

I think the friction of reporting could be replaced with slicker access to information. For example, a taskbar or smartphone widget that tells you how many calories you have left to consume, some sort of UI giving you information as you are selecting a meal (rather than later during self-reporting), or emails/text messages when you go over your target.

Also, transparent information gathering could be useful for later investigations. For example, you might eat normally for two months and then analyze which calorie sources you'd be most willing to sacrifice.

This seems to be a big leap from the current events.

But, indulging the leap :), why would you want it to be a new language? Phones are getting fast - why not python or ruby? (Or Scala, Dart, ...)

However, I don't think Java is a bad language for many programs--and doubt it's headed to a retirement home anytime soon. (I'm frankly thrilled with Java for moving some many developers to a "safe" language/environment rather than C/C++ and its buffer overflows :)

I do agree that Dropbox's wording is much friendlier, but I attribute most of the difference to Google having big plans (e.g., searching and sharing) and being careful that their terms will permit them. I suspect a big part of this is Google's intention to analyze your data to make it indexed/searchable (e.g., their 'search for Mt. Everest and get back your pictures of it' features).

I'm surprised that CS doesn't bring in enough funding to justify itself on those grounds alone. I'm a CS grad student, but I'll confess that I don't know much about UF's program.

As for article asking the reader to imagine the outcry if they cut football or other big sports, the ones that would cause an outcry are probably immensely profitable. It's a fair question whether college athletics has gotten too big, but it's almost entirely irrelevant to this article.

I suspect that people are interested in an article about Valve's culture not (just) because they'd want to work at Valve, but also to take its good ideas and use them elsewhere. I think talking about how one of those ideas worked well or poorly at another company fits perfectly with this discussion.

Looks promising, particularly for the Todo-list type webapps which I suspect could be implemented to run entirely on the client. Are there any apps in particular that you'd recommend I look at to see what your platform can do?

I think a full solution will allow people to implement server-side functionality as well. Perhaps that's in your plans? Also, I think the ability to sell access to apps would help attract developers to your platform.

This is close to what we'd want to replace the business model of a bunch of sketchy startups.

Startups with nice "todo"/personal data apps, etc. (cases where it's silly for the user to put their data in strangers' hands for no apparent reason) could "sell" them to users. If the startup disapeared, the user could still pay for web-app hosting.

The problem with using this particular AWS offering for that purpose is that every app would cost you hourly to run and would vastly underuse the computing resources that the user is paying for. It would be great if there were a similar offering based on a programming model where many apps could be provided by a single instance, or even perform on-demand provisioning.

I think this is the future! Somebody make it happen.

I had a chance to speak with a Google engineer about this not long ago. They said that Chrome was meant to be cloud-centric, whereas Android focuses more on Apps. (A bit of an oversimplification, but generally accurate.)

My take: ChromeOS may actually be better for Google's interests in the long term. However Android's success has resulting in significantly more momentum currently. The release of Chrome on Android might be an effort to move Android more in line with Google's larger goals.

Actually a site like this, which offers a nice, free experience on which nobody is dependent (or entitled) is a great venue for Google to push users to upgrade their browsers.

It's also worth noting that most of PL research does not focus on simply designing new languages. For work that does propose new language features/constructs, it is typically done within the context of a small lambda-calculus/ML-style language to allow the authors to easily explain the implications of and prove properties about the feature. If the authors do take the next step, they'll often add the feature to an existing language (Java/C/Scheme) rather than design a new one from scratch. It's up to practitioners to take the most useful of these "idea-nuggets" and include them in new languages. Most academic researchers view their job as generating these new nuggets, not building and supporting tools based on them for wider consumption.

Work on new type systems is a big part of the field, however these type systems aren't always intended to be deployed as part of languages. Rather, they can often be viewed as bug-finding program analyses. Indeed, program analysis (including type inference/checking) is a much more common research topic than "a new language for X".

I think many in the field agree that more work should be done on language usability, although it is a hard topic to research. The PLATEAU workshops (on the Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools) were efforts in this direction. The Software Engineering field is much more focused on usability and would be the most likely publication target for PL usability research. (The top PL conferences focus on theoretical concerns (POPL, ICFP) and implementation/systems (PLDI, ASPLOS)). Although usability studies are rare, the PL field has gotten tougher about requiring strong arguments about the usefulness of research: the evaluation and motivation sections of papers really need to be convincing.

Perhaps psychology experts could chime in here: I've always been a little skeptical of the Stanford Prison Experiment's findings. It was such a complex experiment whose results might have been drastically affected by each participant knowing that they are the objects of study, the experimenter playing the "warden", people playing along with the game, etc.

I guess I suspect some of the conclusions may be true, but I've never really bought that the experiment itself provided good evidence for them.