Developers: Expect New Major Language Within Five Years by Daryl K. Taft

There’s really not much to this article, mostly a brief report from TheServerSide.com Java Symposium last week. The punchline is that we should expect a “major language” of the stature of Java within five years. Great, yet another programming language that I will have never coded in before being assigned to teach the class… 😉

Actually, my main motivation for sharing this article is that it gives me an opportunity to tell one of my favorite stories about Prof. Evan L. Ivie, who retired some years back from the Computer Science Department at BYU. Evan was at Bell Labs when Kernighan, Ritchie, and all those smart guys invented UNIX and C… in the group that he managed. He was like the Forrest Gump of computing. Seemed like every time something amazing happened in the world of computing, Evan was lurking somewhere nearby (or maybe managing the group that did it).

Anyway, one day in an operating systems class, Dr. Ivie made an offhand remark about “C, or whatever language was the fad at the time”. I was stunned. This was circa early 90’s and C was THE programming language that we all wanted to know, and that we all became really good at. We thought the ten commandments had been handed down to Moses in C, and then translated into Hebrew. What we didn’t know (but Evan did) was that C was the language du jour, and that it would be followed by another, and yet another, and yet another, ad infinitum.

What’s amazing today is the absolute explosion of languages that students and professionals actually know and use: C, C++, C#, Java, Tcl, Python, Perl, Ruby, Smalltalk, Scheme, MATLAB, Lisp, Delphi, Visual Basic, JavaScript, PHP, Prolog, SQL, Pascal, Ada, etc. (PLEASE, Please, please forgive me if I left your personal favorite programming language off this list… please! This is random, and off the top of my head!) It’s not the fact that these languages exist that’s so amazing. Lots of goofy languages have always existed. It’s the fact that they’re all relevant, and are all used by a large enough number of people that most software engineers today have at least heard of them, even if (like me) they don’t know much about them.

So I wonder what the heck we mean by “major” language like Java in the future. Is that our ultimate destiny? An uber-language of some kind? A multiparadigm miracle language? Or is our future to be a large community of programming polyglots, drawing fluently from a dozen different tool boxes? I’m not sure which one I find more exciting… either way it’s pretty cool!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee Gives Congress Vision Of The Future by K.C. Jones

The title pretty much tells the tale. Nice summary of what Berners-Lee had to say to Congress. He is, of course, the inventor of the World Wide Web. It’s hard to come up with many inventions that have so thoroughly impacted the world like the Web. Automobiles? Air travel? Telephones? Cellular telephones? Satellites? Credit cards? The personal computer? Oh yeah, and the web is 17 years old as an invention, 10 years old as a part of most people’s lives. The evolution of the Internet and the Web is like a great sci fi story but with entirely unrealistic time frames.

Oops! Technician’s error wipes out data for state fund

Back to some of the principles that Don Norman writes about in “The Design of Everyday Things”: “I was among a group of social and behavioral scientists who were called in to determine why the control-room operators had made such terrible mistakes [at Three Mile Island]. To my surprise, we concluded that they were not to blame: the fault lay in the design of the control room. Indeed, the control panels of many power plants looked as if they were deliberately designed to cause errors.”

Obviously these aren’t completely analogous situations. But a computer technician accidentally reformats disks containing data pertaining to $38 billion in oil dividends for Alaskans? How does that happen?

Who’s fault is this? The poor schmuck who accidentally toasts off $38 billion of data on both primary and backup disks? Or the software system that let him do it?!

Norman identifies a rule of thumb for door design — if you have to label it “push” or “pull” you designed it wrong. Here’s another rule of thumb — if you have to warn people not to push that one big red switch… maybe the switch shouldn’t be out in the open.

I’d love to know more about just what happened to allow a single computer technician to innocently wreak such devastating havok. I appreciate the fact that they weren’t holding the technician responsible, or conducting a witch hunt. But you’d think that someone (software designers? software architects?) should be responsible, and probably at the design level.

“Stop surfing, make friends, Indian students told”

This is a fascinating article from a few days ago. Apparently administrators at several of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campuses are becoming concerned with the toll that Internet addiction is taking on its students.

“The old hostel culture of camaraderie and socializing among students is gone. This is not healthy in our opinion,” said Prakash Gopalan, dean of student affairs at IIT-Mumbai.

They’ve consequently imposed policies aimed at redeeming the misguided souls.

Starting Monday, Internet access will be barred between 11 p.m. and 12.30 p.m. at IIT-Mumbai’s 13 hostels to encourage students to sleep early and to try and force them out of their “shells”, Gopalan said.

“There has been a decline in academic performance and also participation in sporting, cultural and social activities has gone down,” he said.

In case you aren’t familiar with the IIT system in India, these are top-notch academic institutions, where the very brightest students in India prepare for their careers. If this were America, think Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Berkeley (forgive me if I neglected your favorite top-ranked academic institution in this randomly ordered short list… okay, Carnegie Mellon).

I haven’t decided whether I agree with the new policy or not, but I absolutely agree that Internet addiction is increasingly taking a toll on the youth of the world, including bright engineering students who are otherwise committed to making something of their lives.

In our household we’ve gone through various iterations of Internet lockdown because of deliterious effects on the children as perceived by the parents. Obvious concerns include pornography in all its forms, Internet predators and the usual cast of foul characters. But even more innocent pastimes, like online gaming, can produce addictive behaviors.

Maybe what I’m about to say is hypocritical coming from a Computer Science professor, but I’d much rather my teenager were outside riding a motorcycle than inside surfing the net or playing World of Warquest (apologies to FoxTrot) or Run-escape (hyphen added by the author). I’ve watched individuals outside my own home throw away their lives, their education, their careers, their futures living 16 hours a day in a virtual world, while almost entirely ignoring the actual world around them.

Computers and technology play an important role in improving the quality of our lives. I enjoy the heck out of solving interesting problems in the software field and playing with the latest gadgets. But there’s a time and a place for appropriate use of technology, and it’s not all the time, and it’s not every place.