From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" Date: 2006-06-09T13:32:51+09:00 Subject: Re: I love Ruby - But how bright is Ruby's Future? Matthew Smillie wrote: > I actually pointed towards Paul Graham earlier in the thread, though > not about Arc in particular. I've been watching Arc for a while, and > I think I'll reserve judgement until it actually appears. My bet is > that PG's been sidetracked by the spam issue in much the same way that > Knuth got sidetracked by TeX while writing the Art of Computer > Programming. Email spam doesn't bother me nearly as much as the endless barrage of junk that is delivered to my regular residential mailbox, over half of which needs to be shredded to prevent identity theft. Benjamin Franklin must be rolling over in his grave about now. > Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and James Gosling (and their > colleagues and collaborators) may disagree with your assertion that > they are 'businesses' rather than 'people'. I suppose, but they designed C, C++ and Java with business projects in mind, rather than for the pure joy of it or as an academic exercise. > APL emerged out of Harvard's proto-CS department (not really a > business), though the name of its creator eludes me. Kenneth Iverson. My recollection was that he was an IBM employee at the time he invented APL ... *I* was an IBM employee at the time and I distinctly recall him visiting our labs touting it and looking for a project to bring it to life. Said project later became known as APL\360, a product that was licensed. > I'd also be willing to bet that there was an individual at IBM > directly responsible for designing Fortran (though this hunch is based > more on the nature of Fortran and the size and nature of the industry > at that point in history than any concrete knowledge). John Backus and a team of about five or six others whose names escape me at the moment. Fortran I had been superseded by Fortran II by the time I got to IBM (1962). Fortran I was pretty much an IBM 704 macro assembler with arithmetic statements (FORmula TRANslation) added on. An amazingly primitive language. Now that I think of it, FORTRAN saw the light of day in 1956, which means we should be celebrating its 50th birthday this year!!! Again, a project motivated by a commercial interest. > This was exactly the point I'm trying to make: if a business wants > something which conforms to their needs, they need to directly invest > in the process of its creation. Such as by hiring people like those > listed above to design languages. In the "good old days", language design was in a certain sense subservient to the then-onerous task of compiler writing. As I said in another post, compilers sucked back then, and serious programmers could out-code them not only in terms of execution speed but also in terms of time to completion of the software. If you think *compilers* sucked, compiler-compilers *really* sucked. :) Languages had to be easy to compile or nobody used them. And the phrases we toss about today in discussing Ruby -- meta-programming, domain-specific languages and automatic programming -- were all part of the vernacular in "the good old days". > Their contribution to projects like Ruby (or even Java, if you include > its community process) has always been the marginal one of providing > incidental employment to people who made direct contributions in their > spare time. Uh ... OK ... but I don't consider my employment as a performance engineer "incidental". Maybe the Swiss Patent Office provided "incidental employment" to Einstein while he was pondering the photoelectric effect and relativity. I don't think of the role John Backus played at IBM as "incidental employment". > > That marginal contribution has recently been dropping in importance > for a number of reasons, so it really shouldn't surprise these > businesses that projects to which they make essentially no > contribution don't really reflect their needs. Well ... I think you're understating the contribution of businesses to the "open source community". They contribute because it's good business to contribute, not because they feel guilty about using, say, Linux, which was developed by a community. I don't know how it is with Ruby, since I'm a newcomer to Ruby, but the other open source communities I hang out in don't have any trouble getting contributions from business. -- M. Edward (Ed) Borasky http://linuxcapacityplanning.com