One of the thing’s I’m revisiting is a talk by Todd Proebsting entitled “Disruptive Programming Language Technologies”

It’s a glossy talk, very high level and talking about what might make for the next great programming language. He gave the talk in 2002. Since then, I think we’ve seen the rise of exactly zero new programming languages but the Tiobe index since then has shown an interesting shift: Python, Javascript, and Ruby have all crept up the index, taking market share away from the leaders (Java, C, C++). I think the lesson there is that, in the absence of stunning innovation, progamming language feature sets tend to level out and therefore, the playing field levels somewhat.

But, the question is, what happened to Proebsting’s list?  He gave five candidate “disruptive” features for a new programming language:

1. Flight Data Recorders. Add persistent, automatic “tracing” of function calls, events, I/O, etc. to the language run time.
2. Checkpoints / Undo. Make checkpointing and undo (i.e., restoreto checkpoint) primitives in theprogramming language.
3. Parsing. “Scannerless Generalized LR Parsing” (or Earley parsing) could be integrated into a language.
4. Constraint Solvers. Integrate linear programming constraint solver (or, better, integer programming) into a programming language
5. Concurrency. Concurrent functional programming language.

I think that Erlang is the way the world is experimenting with the last bullet point. And that Groovy’s builders are potentially a different approach to parsing that might meet the sub-criteria of his third bullet point. But bullets 1,2, and 4 seem to be potentially huge and valuable innovations that aren’t currently being addressed.

Is it that we’re stagnating? That I’m overlooking things? Or that these aren’t that important and there are other, much more important, things being cooked up.

The rise of next-generation languages that run on top of the JVM is probably the most interesting thing to happen in the Java universe since the combination of the Spring framework and the EJB 2 specification signalled the complete implosion of the Enterprise Sofware Stack

In this talk, I’ll cover, in sequence:

• A brief overview of the state of the art of web application development
• A brief overview of Groovy, one of the most interesting of the next-gen languages available on the JVM.
• A brief overview of Grails, the best web-application framework currently available (where “best” is, of course, highly idiosyncratic)
• The source code to an actual working web application written in Groovy/Grails.

But, in reality, the talk will mostly be about next gen JVM-based languages and programmer productivity.

The thing that impresses me the most, as I think through the argument, is how consistent I’ve been for the past 6 years.

In 2003, I gave a colloquium talk at CSU Sonoma on why Java is much better than most people gave (or give) it credit for. I was completely right, and the arguments I gave there still mostly hold water. Which means that, for the coming few years, I think Java is still going to be the dominant programming language.

In 2004, speaking at No Fluff Just Stuff (and clarifying afterwards), I made the following four claims:

1. The rate of programming language change and adoption in the mainstream is going to continue to slow down.
2. The style of apps we build will more or less be the same.
3. I think that “web-architectures” (fat server, thin client, markup delivered to interpretation engine) are good enough for >95% of our apps.
4. Server-side container architectures are slimming down and becoming less overwhelming. But client-side containers (and that’s really what a web-browser is) are going to take off.

Of course, the world is changing now. The current downturn, the general maturation of everything, and the rising of what I, with only mild levels of sarcasm, will call “LISP-like language features” means that it might be time for a sea-change.

I’ll know what I think when I finish the slides for my January talk.

• Sometime over the summer, I was unemployed. I had just left Engage, wasn’t yet at Twofish, and was playing around with some ideas and some technologies.
• Paul O’Rorke, who ought to know better, invited me to speak at the SAM SIG.
• I accepted and said something like “Yeah, I’ll talk about the future of the internet.”
• When it came time to send an abstract in, I wrote up something truly grandiose and thought “Okay. Now I have to figure out what I think.”
• Then I decided the real point of talking in December about the future of the web was to ramble, speculate, and otherwise try and be a little disjointed (e.g. make the audience think too).
• Since I didn’t have anything to sell, or any particular axes to grind, I decided to do a historical retrospective and try to figure out what the trendlines show.

Here’s the short version of the talk:

The first 10 years of the web were about rapid evolution of core technologies that everyone used (both standards like HTML and ubiquitous technologies like cookies or FastCGI). A second major focus of the first decade was just on people getting used to things (having websites, using search engines, losing any and all vestiges of privacy, and so on). In addition, most of the basic business models on the web were explored and, by 2001, everything was pretty stable.

The next stage, from then until right about now, was much less about core technologies and a lot more about applying the basics. To the extent that there was technological innovation, it wasn’t around standards or ubiquitous technologies, it was about individual frameworks and application stacks.

In the next 10 years, we’re going to see a vast increase in the number of web-services, an incredible elongation in the value chains that provide web pages (e.g. websites are going to, more and more, be aggregators of back-end content and service providers, who themselves will aggregate …. etcetera), and the emergence of microtransactions as a legitimate business model on the web.

The longer version of the talk rambled a bit, and lasted about 2 hours. It had some significant omissions (for example, I forgot to mention E-Bay), but mostly held together.

I’ve put the slides onto slideshare (here).

The reason was clear: I’ve got a 2.5 year old son and, as those of you with children know, they can absorb almost all your time. So, between the family and the work and the occasional burst of thinking, there hasn’t been a lot of room for the communicating.

Apparently, that’s changing. I spoke at the Software Architecture and Modeling SIG in December about the sea-change in the web that’s quietly occuring. And I’m speaking at the Java SIG in January about next generation Java web frameworks.

Fair warning on the latter: I’m still working on the slides and at least part of the talk is going to be about how meta-object protocols increase developer productivity. I’m not sure exactly what I’m going to say yet, or why I think meta object protocols are more important now than they used to be, but I feel fairly confident that this isn’t going to be a typical “Look! Ajax that sucks less!” sort of talk.

As part of that, I also corrected capitalization and spellings.

So, I’m neither a Republican nor a Democrat.  I’m kind of a ‘tweener in that I’m “liberal” on most social issues, a a classic free-market capitalist on most economic issues, and as close to being an isolationist in foreign policy as you can be in a flat world.

I’m also torn this election because I think McCain is more likely to lead the Iraq effort to a successful end. And I’m a little scared by the tax implications of Obama’s policies (I already pay enough, and government is already big enough). On the other hand, Palin. Well, she ain’t me and she ain’t even close. And that tips me into Obama supporter land.

But I have to say, speaking as an outsider, that the distortions, lies, nastiness, and outright deceptions are pretty much ubiquitous across the political landscape. From my perspective, both sides do a lot of less-than-honorable things, and fling a lot known-to-be-false accusations. And both sides also frequently rear up in righteous indignation.

Even worse, though, is the way their legions of fans do it. In a facebook comment, someone stated that “Palin is a robot programmed to say the same thing over and over” and didn’t get it when I said that seemed dehumanizing.

This morning, a friend’s blog linked to another blog article that led with “Sarah Palin is a stupid, self important, ignorant bitch who I wouldn’t put in charge of wiping her own ass.”

Removing the false (”stupid”, “ignorant” — she’s the governor of a state, even if it’s a relatively unimportant one, and has done a credible job there. That pretty much rules out “stupid” and “ignorant”) and the redundant (”self important”– all politicians are) and the personal judgements that the author is unqualified to make (”bitch”), we get “I don’t want to vote for her.”

Which I agree with.

Rather than blogs helping us recapture the conversation, and bring it back to things that matter, all too often the great majority of posts and utterances are sheer partisan hackery. And that makes me think that we, the great masses, are a significant part of the problem.

If’ we’re willing to sling all this shit around, then how can we begin to correct our leaders?

Anyway, that’s my sundaymorningrant

So, for the past week. aside from a few moments pondering tonight’s “debate”, I’ve been pondering the bailout plan.

Followers of my facebook feed know, of course, that I think the bailout is a bad idea. Even after my lunch with Chris Yeh, who patiently explained the ways in which over-leveraged banks depend on each other’s goodwill to keep their businesses afloat, I still, fundamentally, don’t get it.

Here’s where I was on Monday

• This was a long train coming. It was completely obvious 6 to 8 years ago that the house of cards would eventually collapse. The level of irresponsibility on all sides (from the people who took loans they couldn’t possibly pay back, to the people who wrote the loans, to the mysterious ways in which the level of fraudulence was obfuscated to …. ) has been astounding for a long time.
• At the end of the day, businesses are about taking risks. I work in a startup.  Each and every day, I make judgement calls that could turn out to be wrong. If I make enough wrong calls, …. game over. That’s the whole point, isn’t it? I get to try to build something truly great, and I have to deal with the consequences of failure. Why should financial houses be any different? Why is it a tragedy if they go under?
• The Chrysler bailout didn’t help the automotive industry. Hell, it didn’t even help Chrysler for very long.  There’s no reason to believe that this bailout will lead to fundamental change in the financial sector and, without that, it’s hard to see this having a significant impact.
• I see no reason whatsoever to believe this plan will do anything other than provide a brief band-aid. Maybe I’m being dense, but it seems like a we’re either wasting our time (because things will sort themselves out), or we’re prescribing a headache powder for a brain tumor.

Then came the House vote, and the “new and improved” bill.

• The level of partisan bickering before and during the vote was distressing. If it’s truly a national emergency, then McCain was right to go back to Washington and nobody, on either side of the aisle, should have been finger-pointing. I shouldn’t have heard the Republicans blaming the congress and I shouldn’t have heard the Democrats blaiming the president.
• The earmarks in the current bill are a national disgrace. At the end of the day, either it’s a national crisis, in which case everyone should be working to solve the problem, or it’s not, in which case the bill is active chicanery. Larding in extra spending on unrelated pet projects, and the fact that apparently votes for the larger bill were traded for these earmarks, is incomprehensible and negligent.
• At the end of the day, this makes me feel, more than ever, that California should secede from the United States. I told Chris this over lunch, and he shook his head ruefully, but really: this feels like an East Coast mess to me. In New York, they play weird financial games and in Washington they revel in empty words and in (Northern) California we build software. If New York screws up and Washington makes a power grab, why exactly should I care? Or, more precisely, why exactly should I care enough to support a boondoggle of this magnitude

And so, for all the above reasons, I don’t support the bill. Even though, ironically enough, it’ll help me out.

Another week, another great SDForum Event.

I’ve been a volunteer at SDForum for a while, helping it educate the valley about the almost-bleeding edge in software. And, I’m proud to say: the organization is continuing to do amazing things.

Witness: the cloud computing event.

With our typical quasi-engineering skill at marketing, the first thing you see is the fantastic lineup of people, speakers, and topics. That goes on for pages and pages and gives you a good feel for what the event is all about– these are some high-powered people and they’re all leaders in the adoption of cloud computing (unlike other conferences, which feature people who haven’t done anything talking about what other people might do).

And then, way down at the bottom, you see that the price is astonishingly low:

Pricing:
$90 SDForum Members Price
$115 Non-SDForum Members Price
$45 Platinum Members

That’s about 10% of the cost of a typical one-day event here in the valley. At these prices, if you’re at all curious about where the cloud is going, this is the event to attend.

That reminded me of the startup I founded in 2003. I was relatively new to the idea of founding my own company and, for reasons that are now completely mysterious to me, I thought that it made sense to found a shareware company.

I wrote a toolbar for Internet Explorer that captured all the pages you viewed, indexed them using Lucene, and exposed them via a search interface that included “date based” search. So, for example, you could say “Show me all the pages I looked at last week that involved animals.”

It worked beautifully, did everything I expected it to, and was a highly polished piece of software.

It also didn’t sell very well.

But it was a good piece of software, and a good idea. And, to this day, I treasure Gary Price’s review. He understood what I was doing, what the goal was, and, after a very fair and balanced review, concluded by saying

Kudos to Grosso for not only developing this product but also for making it so easy to use.

When you’re out on a limb, building something new for the very first time, it’s nice to get some praise.

Exciting startup in downtown Palo Alto is seeking a motivated, smart computer science graduate or student who has a passion for Ruby on Rails. We are looking for the following skills:

• Expert in Ruby language
• Expert in Rails 2+ framework
• Good knowledge of in Prototype, Script.aculo.us libraries
• Very good knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript
• Has used Subversion or Git for version control
• Good understanding of SQL using mySQL database
• Knowledge of caching schemes

Flexible hours, compensation negotiable.

Now compare and contrast that with the traditional definition of an intern (taken here from Yahoo)

A student or a recent graduate undergoing supervised practical training.

It’s a startup, so there’s not a lot of people, and they’re all working too hard, so mentoring is out of the question. They’re expecting the “intern” to already know the basic tools of the trade (subversion, git) and to have mastered (”expert” level knowledge) the software and frameworks they use.

Why would a computer science graduate student, who has this level of knowledge, not just do some contracting or consulting? What distinguishes this from that, except for the fact that “intern” means “little or no pay”

If this were an isolated ad, I’d ignore it. But the number of “internships”, by which I mean “startups using the word ‘intern’ when they’re not offering an internship, but simply looking to get top-notch talent on the cheap” is scary overwhelming.

Three possible conclusions:

• A lot of startups have no money left and are trying to squeak by on borrowed labor.
• There are no unemployed developers left in Silicon Valley and people are trying anything.
• A blended combination of the above.

None of these are particularly palatable conclusion.

The loss is even greater now.