Came across another [1] interesting paper today regarding focusing effort on performance vs productivity. Only this time, the topic was applied to the design and implementation of programming languages themselves (as opposed to design and implementation within a programming language):
Disruptive Programming Language Technologies Todd Proebsting November 22, 2002. http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/papers/disruptive.pdf For the past few decades, programming language design and implementation research has concentrated heavily in a few notable areas: type theory, functional programming, object-oriented programming, and, of course, optimization techniques. Yet most of the recent commercially successful languages (e.g., Perl, Python, Visual Basic, Java) are not particularly interesting when judged in these domains. What happened? The newly successful languages represented a "disruptive technology" that allowed it to capture programmer mindshare while everybody else was looking. In this talk, I will present what I think makes a programming language technology disruptive, and I will propose possible future disruptive programming language technologies. At the time he wrote it , Todd was manager of the Programming Language Systems Group for Microsoft Research. I find it a very compelling argument. He makes related observations on his webpage, e.g whereas Moore's law asserts that advances in hardware double computing power every 18 months, he asserts that advances in compiler optimizations double computing power every 18 YEARS [2,3]. Actually, our own Stefano Lanzavecchia wrote an editorial about this in Vector: http://web.archive.org/web/20050206140538/http://www.vector.org.uk/v163/ed163.htm . Might be an interesting topic for the upcoming NYCJUG (which I cannot attend). -Dan [1] Related study posted earlier: http://www.jsoftware.com/pipermail/chat/2009-November/002624.html [2] Todd Proebsting's homepage: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/ [3] His evidence for "Proebsting's law": http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/toddpro/papers/law.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
