Recording Venue: Skype
Guest: Martin Odersky
Host: Markus
This episode is an update on the developments around the Scala language. We covered the new features in 2.7 and 2.8, as well as what’s planned for 2.9. We then discussed briefly the different “proficiency levels” of Scala programmers. The main part of the episode centered around Martin’s new research project: the polymorphic embedding of DSLs for expressing concurrency into Scala.
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Recording Venue: Skype
Guest(s): Scott Meyers
Host(s): Markus
This episode is a conversation with Scott Meyers about the upcoming C++0x standard. We talk a bit about the reasons for creating this new standard and then cover the most important new features, including upport for concurrency, implicitly-typed variables, move semantics, variadic templates, lambda functions, and uniform initialization syntax. We also looked at some new features in the standard library.
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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Anders Hejlsberg
Host(s): Markus
In this episode we have the pleasure of talking to Anders Hejlsberg, Chief Language Strategist at Microsoft. We started by discussing his more distant past, namely, his involvement with Turbo Pascal and Borland’s Delphi. We then looked at the influences Delphi had on C# and how C# evolved from Delphi. In the next section we discussed a couple of general language design issues, among them components and checked vs. unchecked exceptions. Next, we discussed interesting issues about languages of the future, static vs. dynamic typing, functional programming, meta programming as well as the importance of good support for concurrency. We concluded the discussion by looking at the interplay between languages and IDEs.
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Recording Venue: JAOO 2007
Guest(s): Joe Armstrong
Host(s): Markus
In this Episode we’re talking about Erlang with its creator Joe Armstrong. We started by looking at the history of the Erlang language and why it is so relevant today.
We then looked at Joe’s approach to Concurrency Oriented Programming and its main ingredients: share nothing, lightweight concurrency and pure message passing. We also compared this to the classic shared memory approach to concurrency. We then looked at other interesting aspects of Erlang, such as its functional nature (and why this is important to concurrency) and pattern matching. Next we discussed how to implement distribution and fault tolerance, and we took a look at OTP, the “application server” for Erlang.
We concluded the conversation with a littel discussion about how Erlang was designed, it’s current community as well as its future.
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Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Michael Markus
Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Michael Markus
This episode is an introduction to embedded system. It is an introduction in the sense that we cover many topics very briefly: upcoming episodes will provides details for many of these topics.
We start by discussing what an embedded system is an what the important characteristics are. Among them is limited resources, concurrency, real time and hardware integration. We also discuss the range of embedded systems from small mirocontrollers to mobile phones to distributed real time embedded systems. We also cover the different business case for embedded systems (per unit cost) and some non-trivial developmental aspects (cross compilation debugging, heisenbugs).
We close the episode by discussing some important architectural styles (time triggered, event-based, microkernels, state machines) as well as tools of the trade: languages, operating systems and middleware.
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Recording Venue: OOP 2007
Guest(s): Kevlin Henney
Frank Buschmann
Host(s): Markus
In this Episode we talked about the new POSA 4 book which has recently been published. We talk to two of the authors, Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann (the third author, Doug Schmidt was not available – and he had also been on the podcast a couple of times 
). The book contains a pattern language for distributed systems. It contains 114 patterns that had been published before by many different other authors. The patterns have been rewritten to form a consistent language.
We basically talked through the different sections of the book, which gives a really good overview over the challenges and the solutions of building distributed systems. These sections include From Mud to Structure, Distribution Infrastructure, Event Demultiplexing and Dispatching, Interface Partitioning, Component Patitioning, Application Contrl, Concurrency, Synchronization, Object Interaction, Adaptazion and Extension, Modal Behaviour, Resource Management and finally, Database Access.
The book references several other previous works (as listed below). Interestingly, many of these referenced works and authors have also been discussed previously on the podcast. Here are the back references:
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Recording Venue:
Guest(s): Martin Odersky
Host(s): Markus
In this Episode we talk about the Scala language with its creator Martin Odersky. Scala is a language that fuses object oriented and functional programming. Martin started out by providing a two-minute overview over the language, and then talked a little bit about its history. We then discussed the basics of functional programming. The main part of the episode features a discussion of some of the important features of the Scala language:
We then talked about Scala’s actors library, a highly scalable concurrency package. The last part of the episode covered some more general topics, such as where and how Scala is used today, IDE support and the user and developer community. We concluded the episode by looking at current development and next steps in Scala language evolution.
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Recording Venue: OOPSLA 2006
Guest(s): Brian Goetz
David Holmes
Host(s): Markus
This is another episode on concurrency. We talk to two experts in the field, Brian Goetz and David Holmes about aspects of concurrency we hadn’t really covered before.
We start out by discussing liveness and safety and then continue to talk about synchronizers (latches, barriers, semaphores) as well as the importance of agreeing on protocols when developing concurrent applications. We then talked about thread confinement as a way of building thread-safe programs, as well as using functional programming and immutable data. The next set of topics covers various ways of how compilers can optimize the performance wrt. to concurrency, talking about techniques such as escape analysis as well as lock elision and coarsening. We then covered how to test concurrent programs and the consequences of the Java memory model on concurrency. We then went on to look at some more advanced topics, namely, lock-free programming and atomic variables. We also briefly discussed the idea of transactional memory.
Finally, we looked at how better language support – specifically, a more declarative style of concurrent programming as e.g. in the Fortress language – can aid in improving the quality of concurrent programs.
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Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Michael Alexander
Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Michael Alexander
The third part of our concurrency series by Michael and Alexander discusses how to build highly scalable servers. The discussion focusses especially on event-driven servers. As possible solution patterns a reactor-based design is suggested along-side several patterns for multi-threading issues: Reader/Writers Locks, Thread Pools, and Leader/Followers.
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Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Michael Alexander
Recording Venue:
Guest(s):
Host(s): Michael Alexander
In this second part of our concurrency series Michael and Alexander talk about basic patterns for concurrent programming, such as Active and Monitor Object, Scoped Locking and Futures. Further, they discuss some architectural considerations regarding the number of threads and resource usage in general. For more information, see the references for part one as well as the following links
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IEEE Software magazine presents Software Experts Summit 2013, which will focus on Smart Data Science: Harnessing Data for Intelligent Decision Making. Scheduled for 17 July at the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, Washington, speakers include James Whittaker of Microsoft, Paul Zikopoulos of IBM, Wolfram Schulte of Microsoft Research, John Howie of Cloud Security Alliance, Ayse Bener of Ryerson University, and Forrest Shull of the Fraunhofer Center for Experimental Software Engineering. Visit www.computer.org/ses13.
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