Re: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote

[Sundar Narasimhan <address@hidden>]

   On Thursday 10 April 2003 16:17, Paul Graham wrote:
   > Graphics is one of the special applications I was careful
   > to exempt from such predictions.  I expect that it (along
   > with e.g. cryptography and simulations) will continue to have
   > special-purpose hardware and languages to match.  --pg

   Make of this what you will: The DoD's "next generation," applied AI
   simulation system, which will cost several hundreds of millions of
   dollars -- the OneSAF "Objective System" -- is being written in Java.

   http://www.onesaf.org/

   It's kind of interesting that one of the chief designers worked on
   BBN's Butterfly Lisp parallel processing system (I think he worked the
   parallel GC aspect).  And yet, given his experience, they are writing
   special purpose tactical languages and interpreters/VMs.

   (With apologies to Tolkein, "...OneSAF to bring them all and into
   darkness bind them...")

That is interesting -- not only because of Java's strengths wrt. network
comms and threads (lots of ModSAF code could have benefited from those),
but Java's weakness along the UI and numeric performance/correctness
dimensions.

I must admit I don't entirely get the point about sp. purpose
hardware/languages. (While there is *a* trend to specialize "within
the desktop computer", isn't it also true that today one can program
one's set top box w/ gcc and your cellphone in Java -- i.e. general
purpose language/device growth is *another* trend -- and arguably more
powerful? In fact, I would have thought that one of the reasons for
Oak/Java and LLs in general was that the latter trend necessitates 
- a hardware and OS abstraction layer -- such as a VM 
- resource-lightweight languages (Moore's law notwithstanding, there's
  only so much real-estate that a human hand can hold :)
- far more sophisticated understanding of communications (between
  people and programs and between programs themselves)