Channel 9 - Entries tagged with Gilad Bracha

Erik Meijer and Gilad Bracha: Dart, Monads, Continuations, and More

Charles — Tue, 23 Oct 2012 17:58:40 GMT

While attending GOTO Aarhus 2012, the great Gilad Bracha stopped by the venue (he wasn't attending or speaking at the conference. He was in Aarhus to do work with the core DART engineering team, who are based there). Erik Meijer was a track owner for the event, so he was wandering around the halls in his trademark tie dyes...

Gilad and Erik. Same place. Same time. A coincidence that demanded an Expert to Expert session. They kindly agreed to be put into the spotlight (literally) for a C9 conversation. Here's what happened...

Giladism #42: "Mathematicians love to explain things backwards."
Giladism #43: "There is a huge role for mathematical abstractions in programming languages. It's just that you have to know when to shut up about them and stop taking them as religion."

Some highlights:

[00:00] State of programming language design today
[05:01] On actors
[08:28] Dart snapshot facility
[34:07] On monads
[42:26] On continuations and when to hide mathematical complexity from users

Tune in. Enjoy.

Huge thanks to Gilad and Erik for this excellent conversation!

E2E: Donna Malayeri, Gilad Bracha, Luke Hoban - Web Programming and More

Charles — Mon, 14 May 2012 12:45:00 GMT

At Lang.NEXT 2012, several conversations happened in the "social room", which was right next to the room where sessions took place. Our dear friend, Erik Meijer, led many interesting conversations, some of which we are fortunate enough to have caught on camera for C9.

Here, Erik interviews Donna Malayeri (F# PM and Lang.NEXT speaker chair), Gilad Bracha (Dart) and Luke Hoban (ECMAScript). The conversation spans several topics, of course.

Tune in. Enjoy.

SPLASH 2011: Gilad Bracha - Dart, Newspeak, and More

Charles — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 15:30:00 GMT

It's always a pleasure to get the chance to chat with Gilad Bracha. So, whenever we can, we do. We've had Gilad on C9 quite a few times over the years and the conversations are always enlightening and educational. Recently, Gilad joined Google and is now working on the Dart programming language with long-time colleague (and former co-worker) Lars Bak.

Of course we had to ask Gilad about Dart (just the technical stuff, though - like Dart's type system, concurrency model(actor-based "isolates"), future etc...).

Of course, Dart has to compile to JavaScript. So how did this requirement impact Dart's design? Certainly it did, right?

We also get an update on the status of Gilad's very own Newspeak language. What's going on with Newspeak now that he works on Dart full time?

Thanks for coming on C9, Gilad! Always a pleasure.

Recently, Channel 9 was invited to attend the great SPLASH conference. What is SPLASH? Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications: Software for Humanity. 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]

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.

ELC 2010: Standing Roundtable - AmbientTalk, BitC, Caja, Mirrors, Newspeak, Type Classes and More

Charles — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 18:49:00 GMT

A group of us gathered after a long day of language sessions at ELC 2010 and a conversation just happened. Sure, we talked about doing this before the camera started rolling, but I pressed record only when the time was right—when EROS creator and BitC designer Jonathan Shapiro asked Newspeak's Gilad Bracha about his stance on type classes. We then move around the standing circle of language designers and meet E/Caja's Mark S. Miller and one of the AmbientTalk designers, Tom Van Cutsem. It doesn't get any more impromptu than this and we geek out big time. Tune in.

A Conversation with Gilad Bracha

Charles — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 18:21:00 GMT

Recently, I got the chance to spend a few days at the Emerging Languages Camp at OSCON 2010 in Portland, Oregon. It was great to learn about so many new (and not-so-new) approaches to programming language design. The event was set up to ensure the maximum number of sessions in an 8-hour chunk of time, and you will soon be able to watch all the sessions on the Emerging Langs website (perhaps in a few weeks, so keep on checking!).

I caught up with a few folks after each long day of sessions, and over the coming days I'll be posting those conversations here. First up is one of my favorite language designers and personalities, Gilad Bracha. Gilad has no problem expressing his opinions and this is a great trait. He's also a great language designer and his Newspeak programming language is steadily maturing. In this conversation, we discuss a whole range of topics, from what's new in Newspeak to what's wrong with the web (from a languages and tools point of view). As always, this conversation just happened (C9 Classic, as it were...). We sat down, turned the camera on, and this is the rabbit hole we jumped down. It's always great to chat with Gilad.

Tune in.

Enjoy.

Gilad Bracha: Inside Newspeak and Objects as a Service

Charles — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:41:00 GMT

Lang.NET Symposium 2009 was held on Microsoft's campus (make sure you watch the talks, which are available for your viewing pleasure). We were of course there and conducted several interviews with some of programming language design's brightest thinkers.

Here, language design master Gilad Bracha discusses his Newspeak programming language. What is Newspeak and why was it created? What general problems does it solve that can't be done with already existing languages and tools? What does it facilitate, really? We dig into the fundamental ideas, history and future of Newspeak. Gilad was kind enough to keep the discussion at a level appropriate for a broad technical audience and not just for his fellow scientists.

Newspeak People say: "Like Self, Newspeak is message-based; all names are dynamically bound. However, like Smalltalk, Newspeak uses classes rather than prototypes. As in Beta, classes may nest. Because class names are late bound, all classes are virtual, every class can act as a mixin, and class hierarchy inheritance falls out automatically. Top level classes are essentially self contained parametric namespaces, and serve to define component style modules, which naturally define sandboxes in an object-capability style. Newspeak was deliberately designed as a principled dynamically typed language. We plan to evolve the language to support pluggable types."

If you want to understand the thinking behind the thinking of Newspeak, then tune in. Please go ahead and play around with Newspeak, Niners, and provide Gilad and team with feedback.

How far could the notion of Internet-distributed synchronizable objects, or objects as a software service, be taken?

Enjoy

Anders Hejlsberg and Gilad Bracha: Perspectives on Programming Language Design

Charles — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:33:00 GMT

Erik Meijer, Gilad Bracha, Mads Torgersen: Perspectives on Programming Language Design and Evolution

Charles — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:52:00 GMT

I attended Lang.NET 2008 and, as expected, learned a great deal from some of the industry's finest language and compiler minds. One of the most interesting talks was Gilad Bracha's session on his new programming language, Newspeak. Newspeak is really compelling from a language design perspective because of its pluggable type system (everything in Newspeak is virtual). His talk was really deep and targeted at his fellow language designers, but it's all starting to make sense to me now (takes a while to sink into my thick skull).

Erik Meijer, our resident programming language guru and a deacon in the Church of the Lamda Calculus (), was of course in attendance and presented on the current state of Volta (an excellent managed tier-splitting technology that you should definitely play with).

Mads Torgersen, Danish computer scientist and member of the C# design team, was also in attendance. It's always fun to chat with Mads. He's got a very well balanced and insightful perspective on pragmatic programming language design. We're lucky to have him working with Anders et al on the evolution of C#.

I thought it would be a great idea to get these three characters together in one place to talk about what they know best: programming languages. We have a great discussion on type systems, programming language history, DLR and language futures.

If you are into programming language design, then this is for you. There is no white boarding, but the conversation is deep given the topics covered... It's also a really fun interview with exceptional personalities. We laugh a lot, which is always a good thing. So, step outside of the box, settle into a comfy chair (this is a long one - unedited as usual) and get some new perspectives on programming language design and evolution from some of the top minds in the industry.

Enjoy!

Lo-Res version for the bandwidth challanged.

JAOO 2007: Gilad Bracha - Computational Theology, Functional versus Imperative, Language History and

Charles — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:17:00 GMT

I recently got the chance to attend JAOO in Aarhus, Denmark. Besids learning a great amount about various approaches to solving hard problems that we all face as programmers (regardless of the stack we spend most of our time developing on), I got to meet so many interesting people from all walks of programmer life. What a great conference! For one thing, JAOO not about specifc products. It's not about one company's view of the world. It's not about one class of technologies or developer. It's not just about Java and LAMP or .NET and Windows.

I caught up with Gilad Bracha after his session on a new language language he's working on (Newspeak) to discuss a few interesting topics: programming language evolution, static versus dynamic typing, imperative versus functional languages, multi-core and more.

Gilad Bracha is a Distinguished Engineer at Cadence Design Systems. Previously, he was a Computational Theologist and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems. Computational Theologist?! What on Earth? Tune in and find out

Dr. Bracha is co-author of the Java Language Specification, and a researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System.

Enjoy!