Technology innovation
strategy & design
Ravi Pandya
(425) 688-9123
ravi@iecommerce.com
www.iecommerce.com
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January 2003
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Wednesday, January 29, 2003

I went to the crossroads (...) I enjoyed the blogger bash with Sam Ruby at Crossroads in Bellevue last night. It was great to put faces to names, and to meet some new and interesting people. Some snippets: Don Box teasing Miguel de Icaza about his "homage" (pronounced the French way, like "fromage") to C# and Outlook. Miguel de Icaza remaining good-natured and enthusiastic anyway, and graciously refraining from mentioning C#'s homage to Java. Mono has been making amazing progress. I remember when I first saw it I said that they might well ship before Microsoft, given the necessarily glacial release cycle of a 40MLOC OS. Miguel said they've been talking to Red Hat about including Mono, but there are some concerns about Microsoft's patents. I think there's still a good chance you'll be able to buy a shrink-wrap Linux distribution with Mono before you'll be able to buy a shrink-wrap version of Windows with .NET. (Yes, I know you get a lot more goodies in Windows .NET, but the point remains; in fact that is the point: more=later.) I asked Miguel about Mono on OS X and he said that it runs now, but only with the interpreter. However, the next version of the jitter has a more easily retargetable code generation using a finer-grain abstract machine language where they can do instruction-level scheduling and optimization before the final translation to native code, and it takes 30% less time than the original JIT. Slick. Don Box saying that if we're still using C#/Java style languages 5 years from now, we're fucked. Maybe I'll finally get to use Smalltalk again. It's still the most productive programming environment I've ever worked in, though Java with IDEA comes close, and even surpasses it in some ways. Some interesting links that came out of it: (other than another 10 blogs on my blogroll :-) Sun Labs Ace Project UMD DateLens calendar interface Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied 6:49:37 AM