Thank you, Dave, for hosting C9 at YOW! 2012 and for being such a big supporter of what we do here.

See more of the C9 Conversations with Speakers.

Let's see what the godfather has to say about YOW!, JavaScript, HTML5, concurrency, modern development methodologies, technoculture and more. It's always a pleasure to get the chance to talk to Dave and we hope he'll make many more appearances on C9. Thanks again for inviting C9 to YOW!, godfather!

The YOW! Developer Conference offers outstanding opportunities to learn more about the latest practices, technologies, and methodologies for building innovative software solutions as well as the chance to meet and network with international software experts and other talented developers in Australia. Thanks to Dave Thomas and the event's excellent staff—Mary Catherine (MC), Lisa, Aino, Melissa, and others—for inviting me to this excellent pure developer event and thanks to all of the speakers for letting me take some of their time to record conversations for Channel 9. If you live in Australia, or aren't too far away, or just like to travel (who doesn't?), then you need to go to this yearly event. It's outstanding. There are many great developers down under. That's for sure. The speakers are exceptional—Dave and team set a high bar!

Here, we learn about the history of SPLASH and find out what's on Dave's mind with respect to modern app development methodologies. Dave shares his wise opinions on the state of objects, JavaScript, Dart, browser DOM, model-driven development, IDEs, and more. Dave is on a mission to democratize software engineering for the masses by removing unnecessary complexity in programming abstractions (has Dave lost his faith in objects?). What does this mean?

Thank you for spending time with C9, Dave! Always a pleasure. We'll see you again at YOW! 2011

Tune in. Enjoy.

Time codes (thanks to George!):

[00:30] history of SPLASH events since the 1986 beginnings

[02:17] - ref to Ivan Sutherland's amazing SPLASH talk

[02:50] concurrency & parallel programming & the role of hardware / software co-design

[04:40] one of the problems in computer science is that most of the students don't know what is involved in hardware & virtual machines

[05:08] the need to go back to old days feeling of growing hardware / software knowledge together

[05:30] what's the state of object oriented programming?  Commercially imensely succesful but practical is a disaster since it is difficult for people to do abstractions  6:18 F# is a great language but it is hard to use

[06:45] challenge: complexity is exposed and people get lost in this sea of complexity

[07:00] refactoring in practice is difficult for big projects, the tools and practices are not there

[07:16] Object-oriented technology doesn't have the old 4 generation languages (4GL) like Excel & Access

[07:32] ref to the easy of use of some older MS product

[07:50] as we move into the cloud, the challenge is how do we democratise the programming process

[08:15] the need to setup up a Hadoop cluster to search large data, is questioned

[09:02] notion of Virtual machine in the sky and what's Dave's take on Javascript?

[10:30] one of the challenges of Javascript is having too many ways to do things

[11:00] Dart might help Javascript to be more modular

[12:14] there is still lots of room for innovation on the web & mobile. Current impedance mismatch between DOM (in C++) and Javascript, needs to be solved

[14:22] end-user programming comments

[16:20]  reference to a SPLASH paper on direct Mathlab compilation into code.  - mathlab issue translating to c++ (v.s. wiring into silicon)    - going directly from the model to silicon

[16:50] ref to Simulink, compiling Mathlab to GPU & going from brain to code

[17:30] declarative specifications open opportunities for parallelism

[17:53] ref to a SPLASH talk on spreadsheet processed by multicores

[18:18] there is a huge benefit to go directly from model to code

[19:30] reference to model-driven development

[19:55] a lot can be done with the spreadsheets

[21:27] the challenge of slow software

[21:47] the need to be greener in writing software to reduce cycles

[22:20] the state of IDEs.   - Current IDEs cannot refactor huge code

[23:50] - there is a real opportunity for IDEs to breakthrough    - their philosophy needs to change

[25:45] comments on the current tendency to move into the cloud

[29:00] parallelism is a tough problem

Recently, Channel 9 was invited to attend the great SPLASH conference. What is SPLASH? Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity. A big thanks to the SPLASH event organizers for inviting me and my camera to engage some key computer scientists and engineers in geeky, fun conversation! SPLASH is a great event! I learned a ton and met many amazing computer scientists and students.

SPLASH is an annual conference that embraces all aspects of software construction and delivery, and that joins all factions of programming technologies. Since 2010 SPLASH is the umbrella for OOPSLA and Onward! [source=splashcon.org]