Deep into the Blue - Industry Titbits

I have found the responses to my blog thus far a bit intriguing. The general response has been a stiff defence of the current status quo. My opinion (and it is just an opinion), is that the status quo isn't really delivering, and we could all be doing a lot better.

A few articles I've come across recently have re-inforced this opinion. The first article builds on my view that late-bound OO message sends can form the basis for language interoperability. Peter Frisk as recently implemented high performance 3D web rendering using Smalltalk. The usual response to using Smalltalk for such a CPU intensive application is that Smalltalk is too slow. So how does Peter do it?

Well, Peter has utilised the layered DSL idea I've discussed before. So the primitive 3D graphic rendering is performed in ActionScript, which as I understand it is a static, high performance, compiled OO language which runs on the Adobe Flash runtime (Virtual Machine). On top of this he layers a Lisp interpreter, which allows you to call ActionScript primitives from Lisp. On top of Lisp he then implements a DSL that so happens to be Smalltalk-80. As I understand it the Smalltalk implementation is fully interpreted, but this doesn't matter, because the bulk of the graphics rendering is delegated to ActionScript. BTW a domain language programmer using Smalltalk, doesn't need to understand action script at all. Pretty impressive. Take a look (requires Flash 9).

It may look like Peter has gone to all this work for nothing. After all it can all be done in ActionScript, so why Lisp and Smalltalk? The thing is though, is that Peter appreciates the power of late-binding. Smalltalk components written in this way can be mashed-up together to create new objects, in the same way that people are using html and java script to create mashups on the web today.

Another titbit that I have come across that was interesting is a post by Gilad Bracha. Gilad is famous for his work on the Java JVM and worked for Sun until very recently. For me Gilads most impressive work was performed before he joined Sun over 10 years ago, when he did research on Smalltalk, Mixins and Traits, which eventually lead to Strongtalk, the high performance Smalltalk implementation with optional manifest type annotations and a static type checking system. I've discussed Strongtalk before. Gilad has been talking about Self and the idea of slots. C# has the idea of properties, which is a way of implementing getters and setters as used in Java. What if you just make the variable public? And later you want to change it to a method? In both Java and C#, this could mean changing a significant amount of code. With Self this isn't the case (with Smalltalk you can't make an instance variable public anyway, because it breaks encapsulation, so the problem only exists for subclasses). Gilads blog has some interesting examples of better ways to solve/avoid common programming problems using late-bound languages.

Finally, Croquet has announced the release of version 1.0, and is no longer in beta. At the same time the Croquet consortium was officially launched. The consortium is a body to promote the development and adoption of Croquet. Along with a number of Universities the Consortium also contains Hewlett Packard and a new Start-up: Qwaq, a commercial company that will focus solely on collaborative applications using Croquet.

There seems to be growing momentum in the blue plane. Peter Frisk and Vista Smalltalk is definitely worth watching, along with Croquet. I also see Strongtalk as promising, not so much for it's superior performance, but as a bridge into late-bound programming for programmers who are reluctant to relinquish their preference for manifest type annotations and static type checking.