Bertrand Meyer about John McCarthy...

Nice essay about John McCarthy.

Beware the Purists...

See Beware the Purists, Lest They Kill Your Innovation. Much of what is stated there also strongly applies to programming and programming languages...

The Perils of Partially Powered Languages

Here is a worthwhile read: The Perils of Partially Powered Languages. It's from a Haskell perspective, but should apply to other non-underpowered languages as well. ;)

Complexity metrics other than code size don't mean that much...

See here. To cite:

"El Emam and his colleagues repeated some of those experiments using bivariate analysis so that they could allocate a share of the blame to code size (measured by number of lines) and the metric in question. It turned out that code size accounted for all of the significant variation: in other words, the object-oriented metrics they looked at didn’t have any actual predictive power once they normalized for the number of lines of code. Herraiz and Hassan’s chapter in Making Software, which reports on an even larger study using open source software, reached the same conclusion:

'…for non-header files written in C language, all the complexity metrics are highly correlated with lines of code, and therefore the more complex metrics provide no further information that could not be measured simply with lines of code… In our opinion, there is a clear lesson from this study: syntactic complexity metrics cannot capture the whole picture of software complexity. Complexity metrics that are exclusively based on the structure of the program or the properties of the text…do not provide information on the amount of effort that is needed to comprehend a piece of code—or, at least, no more information than lines of code do.'"

Special variables in Java

Wow. This is how complicated it gets to have he functionality of special variables in a language that really doesn't want them (and it's brought to you by Google): Google Guice

A non-hierarchical approach to object-oriented programming

The Lisp historical archive web site just got reorganized. I have made a quick check of the contents, and found out that Howard I. Cannon's original technical report about Flavors - A non-hierarchical approach to object-oriented programming was finally made available as part of that archive. The report was originally written in 1979, was circulated around Lispers, but was never ever published as an actual technical report, although it is cited as such in several later papers by other authors. It describes the original object-oriented extension to the MIT Lisp Machine, heavily influenced by Smalltalk, but with multiple inheritance and method combinations added (but no multiple dispatch yet, which got only introduced in CommonLoops, a direct predecessor of CLOS). Although unpublished and clearly in an unfinished state, this report itself influenced a lot of other subsequent experiments with object-oriented extensions to Lisp dialects. Among other things, it already mentions the idea of exploring "meta-protocols" for making parts of the implementation of the object-oriented extension itself customizable, which was later investigated in much more detail as part of the work on the CLOS MOP (see also The Art of the Metaobject Protocol). And, of course, method combinations were already a very early predecessor of aspect-oriented programming.

It's good that this very important historical document is finally available!

Now is the time...

Now is the time to switch programming languages: Oracle is the borg.