Tag: languages
Episode 91: Kevlin Henney on C++
In this episode, we talk with Kevlin Henney about the C++ programming language. We look at the history and the culture of the language, and how it went through several phases in its evolution. We also take a look at some of the special language features of C++ and their overall influence.
Episode 89: Joe Armstrong on Erlang
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.
Episode 72: Erik Meijer on LINQ
This episode is a discussion with Erik Meijer on LINQ. This is a relatively technical discussion about the following topics: what is LINQ, what are the common abstractions between the different data structures one can access with LINQ, what is the relationship to established languages for querying, how does the integration into the type system of the host language work, how to specify the mapping between the language level classes and the data, and how optimizations are implemented (lazy loading, prefetching, etc.).
Episode 36: Interview Guy Steele
This episode is an interview with Guy L. Steele Jr.. Guy is a Sun Fellow and heads the Programming Language Research Group within Sun, and a generally well known “programming language guy” (see here for details). We briefly talk about Lisp and the resurgence of dynamic languages before we delve into the main topic, the Fortress programming language he is working on. Fortress is a language intended to replace Fortran as a scientific computing language. We talk about how mathematical notations, syntax extensio and built-in support for parallelism are crucial properties of such a language. We then briefly talk about potentials for compiler optimization before taking a closer look at the type system (static typing, type inference), traits and contract specification as well as first-class support for hierarchical components. We conclude the discussion with a look at automatic partitioning and distribuion of concurrent algorithms and a brief look at the future roadmap for the Fortress language.
Episode 15: The Future of Enterprise Java
A very important area for Java are Enterprise Systems. With the advent of new technologies like Ruby on Rails, Java EE 5 or EJB 3 the landscape for Enterprise Systems appears to be changing a lot at the moment. In this episode Markus talks with Eberhard about what Enterprise Java actually is, why and where it is used. Based on that they discuss what the future might look like and how to make Enterprise Java shine in the future.
