Comments

I really enjoyed this video and I really enjoy Erik's presentation. I read Hutton's book a while ago (it's an excellent book -- and thin too) but I also appreciate the additional material Erik is covering, the first lecture was fabulous in that respect.

 

Erik, thank you. Please keep in the opinion and the esoterica (including coding idioms) because it's what makes your presentation so fascinating.

 

Again, thank you for doing these.

Great video; Joe's a lively chap.

I wanted to let those who are interested know that they can watch a video of Joe’s Erlang presentation from the 2002 Lightweight Languages Workshop at http://ll2.ai.mit.edu/.

Firstly, one point people rarely make when comparing static to dynamic typing is that sometimes problems are about classification. For example, lexical analysis and parsing work well with guards and union types found in OCAML, ML and Haskell; some programs fit naturally into a type system. Static, or otherwise, types matter, and if you get them wrong your program will break.

Secondly, I think much of the excitement around Ruby in particular, and dynamic languages in general, is due to the fact that many people equate dynamic languages with REPLs (Read Eval Print Loops). Those whose first encounter with a REPL was via a statically typed language such as ML are less likely to be head-over-heels in love with dynamically typed languages. Dynamic typing != immediate feedback. Static typing != C-like syntax.

"I mean I think the .Net library is great.  It is wide, but does not really feel fat to me.   I mean how does a functional language help you call something like Dns.GetHostEntry() any better?"

You’re right. If you need a library function like Dns.GetHostEntry() who gives a damn if it’s being called from IronPython or C#. It’s there because people need it, not because of static or dynamic typing.

I thought his objection to fat libraries was that developers should think about the problem more, and that given appropriate languages they can build precisely what they need for their app. themselves without necessarily modelling every aspect in OO and/or automatically falling back on a large stack of OO frameworks.

Having said that, I've never really worked with frameworks like Spring or Hibernate so I don't know how bad the problem is. What are other people's experiences with these kind of frameworks? Good for technical-publishers or good for developers?

In .Net’s case I’d agree that the library weight is muscle, not fat; it’s there to do work for people – though with time it's naturally going to become more convoluted.

I really enjoyed this video with Brad. It’s someone honestly describing what they’ve done using .Net technology to create a solution rather than someone spouting hyperbole about technology X being “super this” and “super that.”

 
It strikes a chord with me and I bet it does with some other IT workers too.

Sorry, to clarify, I was trying to reply to s_jetha.

Balclutha wrote:

I don't know about that. I was at the VS launch event at the Birmingham ICC and I'd say less than 5% of attendees were women (Microsoft could tell us, as they have a record of everyone who registered).

I also noticed there were no women up on stage either (although there was always more than one event running concurrently so I can only speak for the developer track).

And as far as at uni, well I was at uni in Scotland 4 years ago and there were hardly any women on my CS course.

I don't know about that. I was at the VS launch event at the Birmingham ICC and I'd say less than 5% of attendees were women (Microsoft could tell us, as they have a record of everyone who registered).

I also noticed there were no women up on stage either (although there was always more than one event running concurrently so I can only speak for the developer track).

And as far as at uni, well I was at uni in Scotland 4 years ago and there were hardly any women on my CS course.

Fantastic, thank you Channel 9.

Exactly! Achieving leverage through components (as discussed in the video) gives one kind of advantage. Reusing software written by others is another. For example, Apple builds on CUPS and Samba, and benefits from improvements made by those who might never own an Apple machine, let alone work for Apple. Some might argue that the balance of power in the software industry is such that this kind of re-use is the only realistic way a company could build a desktop OS that’s competitive with Windows – that’s an interesting form of economic advantage.

Besides, I think now days most people think of an OS as more than a kernel and APIs, and the fact is OS X would be a non-starter without the ton of open source stuff that Apple includes (Samba, CUPS, gcc, Ruby, Python, Emacs, bash, and the GNU text tools are the ones I use often – and of course there are loads I’ll never know about).

What I think is interesting is that Microsoft could use a similar trick one day, if it so desired.

As an aside, I’d love to see every Windows machine ship with IronPython one day (a fantastic open source project at Microsoft) and I think there should be a Scoble interview with Jim (you can watch a talk on IronPython from the LL4 workshop held at MIT at http://ll4.csail.mit.edu/).

I’m was surprised to hear that Monad has generated so much interest, yet at the same time the attention is so germane. As far as I know the semantics of the command line haven’t changed much since Doug McIlroy came up with the pipe, yet I know of no gifted programmer or admin who doesn’t appreciate the command line. MSH is one of the most exciting technologies to emerge over the last year and it’s one of only two Microsoft betas I’ve ever downloaded and used. I don’t hear people ranting about it on too many forums so I assume it’s kind of a silent (serious) majority thing. I think it's going to be a wonderful surprise for so many IT pros out there.

Ace work Jeffery!

 
In this video, and one of his previous ones, Jeffery talks about economics, he also mentions Jim Hugunin’s Iron Python project (the other beta I’ve downloaded and used). Now, Jim’s work is open source, open source is a hot topic a lot of figures comment on, and open source has an interesting economic aspect that people debate (and companies like Apple and Google use to great commercial advantage). I’d love to hear Jeffrey’s views on open source; I believe he’d have something interesting to say.

 
Go on Scoble, can you ask when you go back to do the team tour? Please?

 
Does everyone else love these interviews with people like Ward C. and Jeffery as much as I do? I love it when the interviewee is happy to go off on interesting tangents.