Speaking of things crossing my Inbox, Shane Paterson sent me this email:

Hi Ted,

How’s things in the USA?

I just wrote the following little blog entry I wanted to share with you, which I thought you may find interesting.

---

I used to work with a Naval Architect a few years back. On day we were discussing where the name "Naval Architect" came from. He explained that "Naval Architecture" is really "Naval Engineering" or "Ship Engineering". The word Engineering came into use AFTER the industrial revolution, however ship design existed hundreds of years before. At that time, people needed a name for ship designers, so they reasoned that Architects designed buildings, therefore ship designers must be a kind of Architect too - hence the name "Naval Architect".

Clearly IT didn't exist before the industrial revolution, and IT Architects don't design buildings, so the question begs to be asked "How did we end up with the word Architecture being used for a role in IT". It seems to me to be a rather vague and grandiose name for a role which is probably better described by the use of the word "Engineer".

Perhaps instead of the names "Solution Architect" and "Enterprise Architect" we should actually be using the names "IT Solution Engineer", "IT Enterprise Engineer"?

I've heard this idea put forward before, and I have to say, I'm not overly fond of it, because I believe that what we do as architects is fundamentally different from what a civil engineer does when he engages in the architect's role.

When a civil architect--be it Frank Lloyd Wright or the folks who designed the I-35 bridge in Minnesota--sits down to draw up the plans for a given project, they do so under a fairly strict set of laws and codes governing the process. Not only must the civic restrictions about safety and appearance be honored and respected, but also the basic physical laws of the universe--weight loads, stress, wind shear and harmonics (which the engineers of the first infamous Tacoma Narrows bridge discovered, to everlasting infamy). Ignoring these has disastrous consequences, and a discipline of mathematical calculation joins in with legal regulation to ensure that those laws are obeyed. Only then can the architect engage in the artistry that Lloyd Wright made so much a part of his craft.

Software architecture, though, is a different matter. Not only do we mostly enjoy complete freedom from legal regulation (Sarbannes-Oxley compliance being perhaps the most notable exception, and even then it routinely fails to apply at the small- to medium-sized project levels), we can also ignore most of the laws of physics (the speed of digital signal across a cable or through the air being perhaps our most notable barrier at the moment). "Access data in Tokyo from a web server in Beijing and send the rendered results to a browser in San Francisco? Sure, yeah, no problem, so long as there's a TCP/IP connection, I don't see why not...." There's just so much less by way of physical restrictions in software than there is in civil (or any other kind) of engineering, it seems.

And that sort of hits the central point squarely on the head--there's a lot we don't know about building software yet. We keep concocting these tortured metaphors and imperfect analogies to other practices, industries and disciplines in an attempt to figure out how best to build software, and they keep leading us astray in various ways. When's the last time you heard an accountant say, "Well, what I do is kinda like what the clerk in a retail store does--handle money--so therefore I should take ideas on how to do my job better from retail store clerks"? Sure, maybe the basic premise is true at some levels, but clearly the difference is in the details. And analogies and metaphors have this dangerous habit--they cause us to lose sight of those limitations, in the pursuit of keeping the analogy pure. Remember when everybody was getting purist about objects, such that an automobile repair shop's accounting system had to model "Car" as an object having an "Engine" object and four "Tire" objects and so on, not because these were things that needed to be repaired and tracked somehow, but because cars in real life have an engine and four tires and other things? (Stroustrup even touches on this at one point, talking about an avionics system which ran into design difficulties trying to decide if "Cloud" objects were owned by the "Sky" object, or something along those lines.) All analogies break down somewhere.

Now, to go back to architects and architecture. At the risk of offering up yet another of those tortured metaphors, let me proffer my own architect analogy: an architect is not like a construction architect, but more like the conductor of a band or symphony. Yes, the band could play without him, but at the end of the day, the band plays better with one guy coordinating the whole thing. The larger the band, the more necessary a conductor becomes. Sometimes the conductor is the same thing as the composer (and perhaps that's the most accurate analogous way to view this), in which case it's his "vision" of how the music in his head should come out in real life, and his job is to lead the performers into contributing towards that vision. Each performer has their own skills, freedom to interpret, and so on, but within the larger vision of the work.

Is it a perfect analogy? Heavens, no. It falls apart, just as every other analogy does, if you stress it too hard. But it captures the essence of art and rigor that I think seeing it as "architecture" along the lines of civil engineering just can't. At least, not easily.

Overheard, at the NFJS Phoenix 2008 show:

"We (ThoughtWorkers) are firm believers in aggressively promiscuous pairing." --Neal Ford

This comment deserves response:

First of all, if you're quoting my post, blocking out my name, and attacking me behind my back by calling me "our intrepid troll", you could have shown the decency of linking back to my original post. Here it is, for those interested in the real discussion:

http://www.agilesoftwaredevelopment.com/blog/jurgenappelo/professionalism-knowledge-first

Well, frankly, I didn't get your post from your blog, I got it from an email 'zine (as indicated by the comment "This crossed my Inbox..."), and I didn't really think that anybody would have any difficulty tracking down where it came from, at least in terms of the email blast that put it into my Inbox. Coupled with the fact that, quite honestly, I don't generally make a practice of using peoples' names without their permission (and my email to the author asking if I could quote the post with his name attached generated no response), so I blocked out the name. Having said that, I'm pleased to offer full credit as to its source.

Now, let's review some of your remarks:

"COBOL is (at least) twenty years old, so therefore any use of COBOL must clearly be as idiotic."

I never talked about COBOL, or any other programming language. I was talking about old practices that are nowadays considered harmful and seriously damaging. (Like practising waterfall project management, instead of agile project management.) I don't see how programming in COBOL could seriously damage a business. Why do you compare COBOL with lobotomies? I don't understand. I couldn't care less about programming languages. I care about management practices.

Frankly, the distinction isn't very clear in your post, and even more frankly, to draw a distinction here is a bit specious. "I didn't mean we should throw away the good stuff that's twenty years old, only the bad stuff!" doesn't seem much like a defense to me. There are cases where waterfall style development is exactly the right thing to do a more agile approach is exactly the wrong thing to do--the difference, as I'm fond of saying, lies entirely in the context of the problem. Analogously, there are cases where keeping an existing COBOL system up and running is the wrong thing to do, and replacing it with a new system is the right thing to do. It all depends on context, and for that reason, any dogmatic suggestion otherwise is flawed.

"How can a developer honestly claim to know "what it can be good for", without some kind of experience to back it?"

I'm talking about gaining knowledge from the experience of others. If I hear 10 experts advising the same best practice, then I still don't have any experience in that best practice. I only have knowledge about it. That's how you can apply your knowledge without your experience.

Leaving aside the notion that there is no such thing as best practices (another favorite rant of mine), what you're suggesting is that you, the individual, don't necessarily have to have experience in the topic but others have to, before we can put faith into it. That's a very different scenario than saying "We don't need no stinkin' experience", and is still vastly more dangerous than saying, "I have used this, it works." I (and lots of IT shops, I've found) will vastly prefer the latter to the former.

"Knowledge, apparently, isn't enough--experience still matters"

Yes, I never said experience doesn't matter. I only said it has no value when you don't have gained the appropriate knowledge (from other sources) on when to apply it, and when not.

You said it when you offered up the title, "Knowledge, not Experience".

"buried under all the ludicrous hyperbole, he has a point"

Thanks for agreeing with me.

You're welcome! Seriously, I think I understand better what you were trying to say, and it's not the horrendously dangerous comments that I thought you were saying, so I will apologize here and now for believing you to be a wet-behind-the-ears/lets-let-technology-solve-all-our-problems/dangerous-to-the-extreme developer that I've run across far too often, particularly in startups. So, please, will you accept my apology?

"developers, like medical professionals, must ensure they are on top of their game and spend some time investing in themselves and their knowledge portfolio"

Exactly.

Exactly.

"this doesn't mean that everything you learn is immediately applicable, or even appropriate, to the situation at hand"

I never said that. You're putting words into my mouth.

My only claim is that you need to KNOW both new and old practices and understand which ones are good and which ones can be seriously damaging. I simply don't trust people who are bragging about their experience. What if a manager tells me he's got 15 years of experience managing developers? If he's a micro-manager I still don't want him. Because micro-management is considered harmful these days. A manager should KNOW that.

Again, this was precisely the read I picked up out of the post, and my apologies for the misinterpretation. But I stand by the idea that this is one of those posts that could be read in a highly dangerous fashion, and used to promote evil, in the form of "Well, he runs a company, so therefore he must know what he's doing, and therefore having any kind of experience isn't really necessary to use something new, so... see, Mr. CEO boss-of-mine? We're safe! Now get out of my way and let me use Software Factories to build our next-generation mission-critical core-of-the-company software system, even though nobody's ever done it before."

To speak to your example for a second, for example: Frankly, there are situations where a micro-manager is a good thing. Young, inexperienced developers, for example, need more hand-holding and mentoring than older, more senior, more experienced developers do (speaking stereotypically, of course). And, quite honestly, the guy with 15 years managing developers is far more likely to know how to manage developers than the guy who's never managed developers before at all. The former is the safer bet; not a guarantee, certainly, but often the safer bet, and that's sometimes the best we can do in this industry.

"And we definitely shouldn't look at anything older than five years ago and equate it to lobotomies."

I never said that either. Why do you claim that I said this? I don't have a problem with old techniques. The daily standup meeting is a 80-year old best practice. It was already used by pilots in the second world war. How could I be against that? It's fine as it is.

Um... because you used the term "lobotomies" first? And because your title pretty clearly implies the statement, perhaps? (And let's lose the term "best practice" entirely, please? There is no such thing--not even the daily standup.)

It's ok you didn't like my article. Sure it's meant to be provocative, and food for thought. The article got twice as many positive votes than negative votes from DZone readers. So I guess I'm adding value. But by taking the discussion away from its original context (both physically and conceptually), and calling me names, you're not adding any value for anyone.

I took it in exactly the context it was given--a DZone email blast. I can't help it if it was taken out of context, because that's how it was handed to me. What's worse, I can see a development team citing this as an "expert opinion" to their management as a justification to try untested approaches or technologies, or as inspiration to a young developer, who reads "knowledge, not experience", and thinks, "Wow, if I know all the cutting-edge latest stuff, I don't need to have those 10 years of experience to get that job as a senior application architect." If your article was aimed more clearly at the development process side of things, then I would wish it had appeared more clearly in the arena of development processes, and made it more clear that your aim was to suggest that managers (who aren't real big on reading blogs anyway, I've sadly found) should be a bit more pragmatic and open-minded about who they hire.

Look, I understand the desire for a provocative title--for me, the author of "The Vietnam of Computer Science", to cast stones at another author for choosing an eye-catching title is so far beyond hypocrisy as to move into sheer wild-eyed audacity. But I have seen, first-hand, how that article has been used to justify the most incredibly asinine technology decisions, and it moves me now to say "Be careful what you wish for" when choosing titles that meant to be provocative and food for thought. Sure, your piece got more positive votes than negative ones. So too, in their day, did articles on client-server, on CORBA, on Six-Sigma, on the necessity for big up-front design....

Let me put it to you this way. Assume your child or your wife is sick, and as you reach the hospital, the admittance nurse offers you a choice of the two doctors on call. Who do you want more: the doctor who just graduated fresh from medical school and knows all the latest in holistic and unconventional medicine, or the doctor with 30 years' experience and a solid track record of healthy patients?

Recently this little gem crossed my Inbox....

Professionalism = Knowledge First, Experience Last
By J----- A-----

Do you trust a doctor with diagnosing your mental problems if the doctor tells you he's got 20 years of experience? Do you still trust that doctor when he picks up his tools, and asks you to prepare for a lobotomy?

Would you still be impressed if the doctor had 20 years of experience in carrying out lobotomies?

I am always skeptic when people tell me they have X years of experience in a certain field or discipline, like "5 years of experience as a .NET developer", "8 years of experience as a project manager" or "12 years of experience as a development manager". It is as if people's professional levels need to be measured in years of practice.

This, of course, is nonsense.

Professionalism is measured by what you are going to do now...

Are you going to use some discredited technique from half a century ago?
•    Are you, as a .NET developer, going to use Response.Write, because you've got 5 years of experience doing exactly that?
•    Are you, as a project manager, going to create Gantt charts, because that's what you've been doing for 8 years?
•    Are you, as a development manager, going to micro-manage your team members, as you did in the 12 years before now?

If so, allow me to illustrate the value of your experience...

(Photo of "Zero" signs)

Here's an example of what it means to be a professional:

There's a concept called Kanban making headlines these days in some parts of the agile community. I honestly and proudly admit that I have no experience at all in applying Kanban. But that's just a minor inconvenience. Because I have attained the knowledge of what it is and what it can be good for. And now there are some planning issues in our organization for which this Kanban-stuff might be the perfect solution. I'm sure we're going to give it a shot, in a controlled setting, with time allocated for a pilot and proper evaluations afterwards. That's the way a professional tries to solve a problem.

Professionals don't match problems with their experiences. They match them with their knowledge.

Sure, experience is useful. But only when you already have the knowledge in place. Experience has no value when there's no knowledge to verify that you are applying the right experience.

Knowledge Comes First, Experience Comes Last

This is my message to anyone who wants to be a professional software developer, a professional project manager, or a professional development manager.

You must gain and apply knowledge first, and experience will help you after that. Professionals need to know about the latest developments and techniques.

They certainly don't bother measuring years of experience.

Are you still practicing lobotomies?

Um....

Wow.

Let's start with the logical fallacy in the first section. Do I trust a doctor with diagnosing my mental problems if he tells me he's got 20 years of experience? Generally, yes, unless I have reasons to doubt this. If the guy picks up a skull-drill and starts looking for a place to start boring into my skull, sure, I'll start to question his judgement.... But what does this have to do with anything? I wouldn't trust the guy if he picked up a chainsaw and started firing it up, either.

Look, I get the analogy: "Doctor has 20 years of experience using outdated skills", har har. Very funny, very memorable, and totally inappropriate metaphor for the situation. To stand here and suggest that developers who aren't using the latest-and-greatest, so-bleeding-edge-even-saying-the-name-cuts-your-skin tools or languages or technologies are somehow practicing lobotomies (which, by the way, are still a recommended practice in certain mental disorder cases, I understand) in order to solve any and all mental-health issues, is a gross mischaracterization--and the worst form of negligence--I've ever heard suggested.

And it comes as no surprise that it's coming from the CIO of a consulting company. (Note to self: here's one more company I don't want anywhere near my clients' IT infrastructure.)

Let's take this analogy to its logical next step, shall we?

COBOL is (at least) twenty years old, so therefore any use of COBOL must clearly be as idiotic as drilling holes in your skull to let the demons out. So any company currently using COBOL has no real option other than to immediately upgrade all of their currently-running COBOL infrastructure (despite the fact that it's tested, works, and cashes most of the US banking industry's checks on a daily basis) with something vastly superior and totally untested (since we don't need experience, just knowlege), like... oh, I dunno.... how about Ruby? Oh, no, wait, that's at least 10 years old. Ditto for Java. And let's not even think about C, Perl, Python....

I know; let's rewrite the entire financial industry's core backbone in Groovy, since it's only, what, 6 years old at this point? I mean, sure, we'll have to do all this over again in just four years, since that's when Groovy will turn 10 and thus obviously begin it's long slide into mediocrity, alongside the "four humors" of medicine and Aristotle's (completely inaccurate) anatomical depictions, but hey, that's progress, right? Forget experience, it has no value compared to the "knowledge" that comes from reading the documentation on a brand-new language, tool, library, or platform....

What I find most appalling is this part right here:

I honestly and proudly admit that I have no experience at all in applying Kanban. But that's just a minor inconvenience. Because I have attained the knowledge of what it is and what it can be good for.

How can a developer honestly claim to know "what it can be good for", without some kind of experience to back it? (Hell, I'll even accept that you have familiarity and experience with something vaguely relating to the thing at hand, if you've got it--after all, experience in Java makes you a pretty damn good C# developer, in my mind, and vice versa.)

And, to make things even more interesting, our intrepid troll, having established the attention-gathering headline, then proceeds to step away from the chasm, by backing away from this "knowledge-not-experience" position in the same paragraph, just one sentence later:

I'm sure we're going to give it a shot, in a controlled setting, with time allocated for a pilot and proper evaluations afterwards.

Ah... In other words, he and his company are going to experiment with this new technique, "in a controlled setting, with time allocated for a pilot and proper evaluations afterwards", in order to gain experience with the technique and see how it works and how it doesn't.

In other words....

.... experience matters.

Knowledge, apparently, isn't enough--experience still matters, and it matters a lot earlier than his "knowledge first, experience last" mantra seems to imply. Otherwise, once you "know" something, why not apply it immediately to your mission-critical core?

At the end of the day, buried under all the ludicrous hyperbole, he has a point: developers, like medical professionals, must ensure they are on top of their game and spend some time investing in themselves and their knowledge portfolio. Jay Zimmerman takes great pains to point this out at every No Fluff Just Stuff show, and he's right: those who spend the time to invest in their own knowledge portfolio, find themselves the last to be fired and the first to be hired. But this doesn't mean that everything you learn is immediately applicable, or even appropriate, to the situation at hand. Just because you learned Groovy last weekend in Austin doesn't mean you have the right--or the responsibility--to immediately start slipping Groovy in to the production servers. Groovy has its share of good things, yes, but it's got its share of negative consequences, too, and you'd better damn well know what they are before you start betting the company's future on it. (No, I will not tell you what those negative consequences are--that's your job, because what if it turns out I'm wrong, or they don't apply to your particular situation?) Every technology, language, library or tool has a positive/negative profile to it, and if you can't point out the pros as well as the cons, then you don't understand the technology and you have no business using it on anything except maybe a prototype that never leaves your local hard disk. Too many projects were built with "flavor-of-the-year" tools and technologies, and a few years later, long after the original "bleeding-edge" developer has gone on to do a new project with a new "bleeding-edge" technology, the IT guys left to admin and upkeep the project are struggling to find ways to keep this thing afloat.

If you're languishing at a company that seems to resist anything and everything new, try this exercise on: go down to the IT guys, and ask them why they resist. Ask them to show you a data flow diagram of how information feeds from one system to another (assuming they even have one). Ask them how many different operating systems they have, how many different languages were used to create the various software programs currently running, what tools they have to know when one of those programs fails, and how many different data formats are currently in use. Then go find the guys currently maintaining and updating and bug-fixing those current programs, and ask to see the code. Figure out how long it would take you to rewrite the whole thing, and keep the company in business while you're at it.

There is a reason "legacy code" exists, and while we shouldn't be afraid to replace it, we shouldn't be cavalier about tossing it out, either.

And we definitely shouldn't look at anything older than five years ago and equate it to lobotomies. COBOL had some good ideas that still echo through the industry today, and Groovy and Scala and Ruby and F# undoubtedly have some buried mines that we will, with benefit of ten years' hindsight, look back at in 2018 and say, "Wow, how dumb were we to think that this was the last language we'd ever have to use!".

That's experience talking.

And the funny thing is, it seems to have served us pretty well. When we don't listen to the guys claiming to know how to use something effectively that they've never actually used before, of course.

Caveat emptor.

If you've peeked at my blog site in the last twenty minutes or so, you've probably noticed some churn in the template in the upper-left corner; by now, it's been finalized, and it reads "JOB REFERRALS".

WTHeck? Has Ted finally sold out? Sort of, not really. At least, I don't think so.

Here's the deal: the company behind those ads, Entice Labs, contacted me to see if I was interested in hosting some job ads on my blog, given that I seem to generate a moderate amount of traffic. I figured it was worthwhile to at least talk to them, and the more I did, the more I liked what I heard--the ads are focused specifically at developers of particular types (I chose a criteria string of "Software Developers", subcategorized by "Java, .NET, .NET (Visual Basic), .NET (C#), C++, Flex, Ruby on Rails, C, SQL, JavaScript, HTML" though I'm not sure whether "HTML" will bring in too many web-designer jobs), and visitors to my blog don't have to click through the ads to get to the content, which was important to me. And, besides, given the current economic climate, if I can help somebody find a new job, I'd like to.

Now for the full disclaimer: I will be getting money back from these job ads, though how much, to be honest with you, I'm not sure. I'm really not doing this for the money, so I make this statement now: I will take 50% of whatever I make through this program and donate it to a charitable organization. The other 50% I will use to offset travel and expenses to user groups and/or CodeCamps and/or for-free conferences put on throughout the country. (Email me if you know of one that you're organizing or attending and would like to see me speak at, and I'll tell you if there's any room in the budget left for it. )

Anyway, I figured if the ads got too obnoxious, I could always remove them; it's an experiment of sorts. Tell me what you think.

After the previous post, I just had to look. The implementation of Object.equals is, as was previously noted, just "return this == obj", but the implementation of Object.hashCode is far more complicated.

Taken straight from the latest hg-pulled OpenJDK sources, Object.hashCode is a native method registered from Object.c that calls into a Hotspot-exported function, JVM_IHashCode(), from hotspot\src\share\vm\prims\jvm.cpp:

JVM_ENTRY(jint, JVM_IHashCode(JNIEnv* env, jobject handle))
  JVMWrapper("JVM_IHashCode");
  // as implemented in the classic virtual machine; return 0 if object is NULL
  return handle == NULL ? 0 : ObjectSynchronizer::FastHashCode (THREAD, JNIHandles::resolve_non_null(handle)) ;
JVM_END

which in turn calls ObjectSynchronizer::FastHashCode, defined in hotspot\src\share\vm\runtime\synchronizer.cpp as:

intptr_t ObjectSynchronizer::FastHashCode (Thread * Self, oop obj) {
  if (UseBiasedLocking) {
    // NOTE: many places throughout the JVM do not expect a safepoint
    // to be taken here, in particular most operations on perm gen
    // objects. However, we only ever bias Java instances and all of
    // the call sites of identity_hash that might revoke biases have
    // been checked to make sure they can handle a safepoint. The
    // added check of the bias pattern is to avoid useless calls to
    // thread-local storage.
    if (obj->mark()->has_bias_pattern()) {
      // Box and unbox the raw reference just in case we cause a STW safepoint.
      Handle hobj (Self, obj) ;
      // Relaxing assertion for bug 6320749.
      assert (Universe::verify_in_progress() ||
              !SafepointSynchronize::is_at_safepoint(),
             "biases should not be seen by VM thread here");
      BiasedLocking::revoke_and_rebias(hobj, false, JavaThread::current());
      obj = hobj() ;
      assert(!obj->mark()->has_bias_pattern(), "biases should be revoked by now");
    }
  }

  // hashCode() is a heap mutator ...
  // Relaxing assertion for bug 6320749.
  assert (Universe::verify_in_progress() ||
          !SafepointSynchronize::is_at_safepoint(), "invariant") ;
  assert (Universe::verify_in_progress() ||
          Self->is_Java_thread() , "invariant") ;
  assert (Universe::verify_in_progress() ||
         ((JavaThread *)Self)->thread_state() != _thread_blocked, "invariant") ;

  ObjectMonitor* monitor = NULL;
  markOop temp, test;
  intptr_t hash;
  markOop mark = ReadStableMark (obj);

  // object should remain ineligible for biased locking
  assert (!mark->has_bias_pattern(), "invariant") ;

  if (mark->is_neutral()) {
    hash = mark->hash();              // this is a normal header
    if (hash) {                       // if it has hash, just return it
      return hash;
    }
    hash = get_next_hash(Self, obj);  // allocate a new hash code
    temp = mark->copy_set_hash(hash); // merge the hash code into header
    // use (machine word version) atomic operation to install the hash
    test = (markOop) Atomic::cmpxchg_ptr(temp, obj->mark_addr(), mark);
    if (test == mark) {
      return hash;
    }
    // If atomic operation failed, we must inflate the header
    // into heavy weight monitor. We could add more code here
    // for fast path, but it does not worth the complexity.
  } else if (mark->has_monitor()) {
    monitor = mark->monitor();
    temp = monitor->header();
    assert (temp->is_neutral(), "invariant") ;
    hash = temp->hash();
    if (hash) {
      return hash;
    }
    // Skip to the following code to reduce code size
  } else if (Self->is_lock_owned((address)mark->locker())) {
    temp = mark->displaced_mark_helper(); // this is a lightweight monitor owned
    assert (temp->is_neutral(), "invariant") ;
    hash = temp->hash();              // by current thread, check if the displaced
    if (hash) {                       // header contains hash code
      return hash;
    }
    // WARNING:
    //   The displaced header is strictly immutable.
    // It can NOT be changed in ANY cases. So we have
    // to inflate the header into heavyweight monitor
    // even the current thread owns the lock. The reason
    // is the BasicLock (stack slot) will be asynchronously
    // read by other threads during the inflate() function.
    // Any change to stack may not propagate to other threads
    // correctly.
  }

  // Inflate the monitor to set hash code
  monitor = ObjectSynchronizer::inflate(Self, obj);
  // Load displaced header and check it has hash code
  mark = monitor->header();
  assert (mark->is_neutral(), "invariant") ;
  hash = mark->hash();
  if (hash == 0) {
    hash = get_next_hash(Self, obj);
    temp = mark->copy_set_hash(hash); // merge hash code into header
    assert (temp->is_neutral(), "invariant") ;
    test = (markOop) Atomic::cmpxchg_ptr(temp, monitor, mark);
    if (test != mark) {
      // The only update to the header in the monitor (outside GC)
      // is install the hash code. If someone add new usage of
      // displaced header, please update this code
      hash = test->hash();
      assert (test->is_neutral(), "invariant") ;
      assert (hash != 0, "Trivial unexpected object/monitor header usage.");
    }
  }
  // We finally get the hash
  return hash;
}

Hope this answers all the debates.

Editor's note: Yes, I know it's a long quotation of code completely out of context; my goal here is simply to suggest that the hashCode() implementation is not just a integerification of the object's address in memory, as was suggested in other discussions. For whatever it's worth, the get_next_hash() implementation that's referenced in the FastHashCode() method looks like:

// hashCode() generation :
//
// Possibilities:
// * MD5Digest of {obj,stwRandom}
// * CRC32 of {obj,stwRandom} or any linear-feedback shift register function.
// * A DES- or AES-style SBox[] mechanism
// * One of the Phi-based schemes, such as:
//   2654435761 = 2^32 * Phi (golden ratio)
//   HashCodeValue = ((uintptr_t(obj) >> 3) * 2654435761) ^ GVars.stwRandom ;
// * A variation of Marsaglia's shift-xor RNG scheme.
// * (obj ^ stwRandom) is appealing, but can result
//   in undesirable regularity in the hashCode values of adjacent objects
//   (objects allocated back-to-back, in particular).  This could potentially
//   result in hashtable collisions and reduced hashtable efficiency.
//   There are simple ways to "diffuse" the middle address bits over the
//   generated hashCode values:
//

static inline intptr_t get_next_hash(Thread * Self, oop obj) {
  intptr_t value = 0 ;
  if (hashCode == 0) {
     // This form uses an unguarded global Park-Miller RNG,
     // so it's possible for two threads to race and generate the same RNG.
     // On MP system we'll have lots of RW access to a global, so the
     // mechanism induces lots of coherency traffic.
     value = os::random() ;
  } else
  if (hashCode == 1) {
     // This variation has the property of being stable (idempotent)
     // between STW operations.  This can be useful in some of the 1-0
     // synchronization schemes.
     intptr_t addrBits = intptr_t(obj) >> 3 ;
     value = addrBits ^ (addrBits >> 5) ^ GVars.stwRandom ;
  } else
  if (hashCode == 2) {
     value = 1 ;            // for sensitivity testing
  } else
  if (hashCode == 3) {
     value = ++GVars.hcSequence ;
  } else
  if (hashCode == 4) {
     value = intptr_t(obj) ;
  } else {
     // Marsaglia's xor-shift scheme with thread-specific state
     // This is probably the best overall implementation -- we'll
     // likely make this the default in future releases.
     unsigned t = Self->_hashStateX ;
     t ^= (t << 11) ;
     Self->_hashStateX = Self->_hashStateY ;
     Self->_hashStateY = Self->_hashStateZ ;
     Self->_hashStateZ = Self->_hashStateW ;
     unsigned v = Self->_hashStateW ;
     v = (v ^ (v >> 19)) ^ (t ^ (t >> 8)) ;
     Self->_hashStateW = v ;
     value = v ;
  }

  value &= markOopDesc::hash_mask;
  if (value == 0) value = 0xBAD ;
  assert (value != markOopDesc::no_hash, "invariant") ;
  TEVENT (hashCode: GENERATE) ;
  return value;
}

Thus (hopefully) putting the idea that it might be allocating a hash based on the object's identity completely to rest.

For the record, this is all from the OpenJDK source base--naturally, it's possible that earlier VM implementations did something entirely different.

I'm not sure what it is about our industry that promotes the flame war, but for some reason exchanges like this one, unheard of in any other industry I've ever touched (even tangentially), are far too common, too easy to get into, and entirely too counterproductive.

I'm not going to weigh in on one side or the other here; frankly, I have a hard time following the debate and figuring out who's exactly arguing for what. I can see, however, that the entire debate follows some traditional patterns of the flame war:

1. Citing yourself as the final authority. At no point during the debate does anybody reach for their copy of Effective Java, a widely-accepted source of Java guidance, for a potential resolution to the discussion. Instead, the various players simply say, "Fact A is true" or "Fact A is false", with zero supporting information, citations, or demonstrations either way. (A few people cite the Javadoc, but there is enough ambiguity there to merit further citation.)
2. Refusal to accept the possibility of an alternative viewpoint. At no point, near as I can tell, did any of the participants bother to say, "You know, you could be right, but I remain unconvinced. Can you give me more information to support your point of view?" The entire time, everybody is arguing from "fact", and nobody even considers the possibility that different JVMs can have different implementations, despite the fact that the Javadoc being quoted says as much.
3. Degeneration into personal attacks. I don't care who started it, I don't care who called who the worse name. Fact is, reasonable people can reasonably disagree, and nobody in that transcript seemed overly reasonable to me.
4. Nobody ever really gets around to answering the question because they're too busy arguing their position or point. Poor "doub", the initiator of the question, tries valiantly to circle the conversation back on topic, but the various players are too busy whipping out their instruments of manhood onto the table so everybody can see how much bigger it is than the other guys'. When "doub" points out that writing some sample code "gave me a very loose but still usefull information about my object, and took less time than the conversation about my question ", or in other words, "Hey, guys, I kinda already got my answer, can we move on now?", the conversation continues as if the comment never occurred--the question has turned into a "biggest-geek" argument by this point. "doub" even asks, at 10:12:12, "do i get bad karma points for being the initiator of a conflict?", and the image I get in my head is that of the poor kid, hiding in his bedroom while his parents yell and scream downstairs, feeling awful because the fight started over his backpack lying in the hallway where Mom told him to put it and Dad thought he left it instead of putting it away. ("doub", if you read this, no, you get no bad karma points, at least not in my universe.)

The interesting thing, though, is that this conversation has nothing to do with Scala. "dysinger" twitters:

• "It's no wonder scala sucks at gaining any momentum with that kind of academic egomaniac cliques going on in the community." (http://twitter.com/dysinger/statuses/859189384)
• "@DRMacIver if you often get called an academic programmer, it's probably because you _are_ one. Scala + zero tolerance + ego = academic." (http://twitter.com/dysinger/statuses/859201109)
• "@DRMaclver starts with this "Or, in other words, you're full of shit. Kindly shut up about this now." to my chat. That set me off. Idiot." (http://twitter.com/dysinger/statuses/859204285)
• "ok - I am better now. I was seeing red for a minute there.... R.I.P. Scala You were barely a twinkle in somebody's eye and now your dead." (http://twitter.com/dysinger/statuses/859214117)
• "Felt better when I wrote some scala code to prove to #scala that they have a tard for a channel op -> http://is.gd/Ulx" (http://twitter.com/dysinger/statuses/859457360)

Frankly, "dysinger", it's kinda hard to have much sympathy for somebody when they blame the language or tool for a conversation that's had around it; this would be like blaming Python, the language, for the community around it (which some people do, I understand). I can understand the frustration, on both sides, since everybody was essentially arguing past one another, but why is that Scala's fault, pray tell?

And frankly, I find the dig at the academics to be a tad disingenuous. Yes, academics have a reputation--duly earned in some cases--of being removed from reality and the slings and arrows of a life spent developing software for production environments, but name for me a language in the popular mainstream that doesn't owe a huge debt to the preliminary work laid down by academics before it. In every other industry, academics are revered and honored--it's only in this industry they are used as an example of degradation and insult. Way to bite the hand that makes your life easier, folks....

At the end of the day, these kind of debates do nothing but harm the innocent, "doub", in this case. "dysinger", "DrMacIver", "JamesIry", all of you, right or wrong, didn't exactly cover yourselves in glory, nor did you really convince anybody of anything. Instead, you shouted at each other really loudly, made lots of noise, got angry over nothing in particular, and really failed to achieve much of anything. Regardless of your intentions, now Scala, Java, the JVM and the entire ecosystem have seen their reputation tarnished just a touch more than it was when you started. Great job.

Here's a tip for all of you: Try listening.

Google (or at least some part of it) has now weighed in on the whole XML discussion with the recent release of their "Protocol Buffers" implementation, and, quite naturally, the debates have begun, with all the carefully-weighed logic, respectful discourse, and reasoned analysis that we've come to expect and enjoy from this industry.

Yeah, right.

Anyway, without trying to take sides either way in this debate--yes, the punchline is that I believe in a world where both XML and Protocol Buffers are useful--I thought I'd weigh in on some of the aspects about PBs that are interesting/disturbing, but more importantly, try to frame some of the debate and discussions around these two topics in a vain attempt to wring some coherency and sanity out of what will likely turn into a large shouting match.

For starters, let's take a quick look at how PBs work.

Protocol Buffers 101

The idea behind PBs is pretty straightforward: given a PB definition file, a code-generator tool builds C++, Java or Python accessors/generators that know how to parse and produce files in the Protocol Buffer format. The generated classes follow a pretty standard format, using the traditional POJO/JavaBean style get/set for Java classes, and something similar for both the Python and C++ classes. (The Python implementation is a tad different from the C++ and Java versions, as it makes use of Python metaclasses to generate the class at runtime, rather than at generation-time.) So, for example, given the Google example of:

message Person {
  required string name = 1;
  required int32 id = 2;
  optional string email = 3;

  enum PhoneType {
    MOBILE = 0;
    HOME = 1;
    WORK = 2;
  }

  message PhoneNumber {
    required string number = 1;
    optional PhoneType type = 2 [default = HOME];
  }

  repeated PhoneNumber phone = 4;
}

... using the corresponding generated C++ class would look something like

Person person;
person.set_name("John Doe");
person.set_id(1234);
person.set_email("jdoe@example.com");
fstream output("myfile", ios::out | ios::binary);
person.SerializeToOstream(&output);

... and the Java implementation would look somewhat similar, except using a Builder to create the Person.

The Protocol Buffer interoperable definition language is relatively complete, with support for a full range of scalar types, enumerations, variable-length collections of these types, nested message types, and so on. Each field in the message is tagged with a unique field number, as you can see above, and the language provides the ability to "reserve" field IDs via the "extension" mechanism, presumably to allow for either side to have flexibility in extending the PB format.

There's certainly more depth to the PB format, including the "service" and "rpc" features of the language that will generate full RPC proxies, but this general overview serves to provide the necessary background to be able to engage in an analysis of PBs.

Protocol Buffers: An Analysis

When looking at Protocol Buffers, it's important to realize that this is an open-source implementation, and that Google has already issued a call to others to modify them and submit patches to the project. Anything that comes across as a criticism or inherent flaw in the implementation is thus correctable, though whether Google would apply those fixes to the version they use internally is an open question--there's a tension in any open-source project sponsored by a company, between "What we need the project for" and "What other people using the project need it for", and it's not always clear how that tension will play out in the long term.

So, without further ado ...

For starters, Protocol Buffers' claim to be language and/or platform-neutral is hardly justifiable, given that they have zero support for the .NET platform out of the box. Now, before the Googlists and Google-fanbois react angrily, let me be the first to admit, that yes, nothing stops anybody from producing said capability and contributing it back to the project. In fact, there's even some verbage to that effect on the Protocol Buffers' FAQ page. But without it coming out of the box, it's not fair to claim language- and platform-neutrality, unless, of course, they are willing to suggest that COM's Structured Storage was also language- and platform-neutral, and that it wasn't Microsoft's fault that nobody went off and built implementations for it under *nix or the Mac. Frankly, any binary format, regardless of how convoluted, could be claimed to be language- and platform-neutral under those conditions, which I think makes the claim spurious to make. The fact that Google doesn't care about the .NET platform doesn't mean that their implementation is incapable of running on it; the fact that Google wrote their code generator to support C++, Java and Python doesn't mean that Protocol Buffers are language- and platform-neutral, either. XML still holds the edge here, by a long shot--until we see implementations of Protocol Buffers for Perl/Parrot, C, D, .NET, Ruby, JavaScript, mainframes and others, PBs will have to take second-place status behind XML in terms of "reach" across the wide array of systems. Does that diminish their usefulness? Hardly. It just depends on how far a developer wants their data format to stretch.

Having gotten that little bit out of the way ...

Remember a time when binary formats were big? Back in the early- to mid-90's, binary formats were all the rage, and criticism of them abounded: they were hard to follow, hard to debug, bloated, inherently inflexible, tightly-coupled, and so on. Consider, for example, this article comparing XML against its predecessor information-exchange technologies:

A great example ... is a data feed of all orders taken electronically via a web site into an internal billing and shipping system. The main advantage of XML here is it's flexibility - developers create their own tags and dictionaries, as they deem necessary. Therefore no matter what type of data is being transferred, the right XML representation of it will accurately describe the data.

Logically, each order can be described as one customer purchasing one or more items using their credit card and potentially entering different billing and shipping addresses. The contents of the file are very easy to read, even for a person who is not familiar with XML. The information within each of the order tags is well structured and organized. This enables developers to use parsing components and easily access any data within the document. Each item in the order is logically a unique entity, and is also represented with a separate tag. All item properties are defined as "child" nodes of the item tag.

XML is the language of choice for two major reasons. First of all, an XML formatted document can be easily processed under any OS, and in any language, as long as XML parsing components are available. On the other hand, XML files are still raw data, which enables merchants to format the data any way they want to. All in all, document structure and wide acceptance of this format has made it possible to enable customers to build more efficient internal order Tracking systems based on XML-formatted order files. Other online merchant sites are making similar functionality available on their Web sites as well.

And yet, now, the criticism goes the other way, complaining that XML is bloated, hard to follow, and so on:

Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.

How do we reconcile these apparently contradictory positions?

First of all, I don't think anybody in the XML community has ever sought to argue that XML was designed for efficiency; in fact, quite the opposite, as the XML specification itself states in the abstract:

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a subset of SGML that is completely described in this document. Its goal is to enable generic SGML to be served, received, and processed on the Web in the way that is now possible with HTML. XML has been designed for ease of implementation and for interoperability with both SGML and HTML. ... This document specifies a syntax created by subsetting an existing, widely used international text processing standard (Standard Generalized Markup Language, ISO 8879:1986(E) as amended and corrected) for use on the World Wide Web.

The Introduction section is even more explicit:

XML documents are made up of storage units called entities, which contain either parsed or unparsed data. Parsed data is made up of characters, some of which form character data, and some of which form markup. Markup encodes a description of the document's storage layout and logical structure. XML provides a mechanism to impose constraints on the storage layout and logical structure.

And if that wasn't clear enough....

The design goals for XML are:

1. XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
2. XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
3. XML shall be compatible with SGML.
4. It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
5. The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute minimum, ideally zero.
6. XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
7. The XML design should be prepared quickly.
8. The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
9. XML documents shall be easy to create.
10. Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.

In essence, then, the goal of XML was never to be small or fast, but still clearly simple. And, despite your personal opinion about the ecosystem that has grown up around XML (SOAP, WS-*, and so on), it's still fairly easy to defend the idea that XML itself is a simple technology, particularly if we make some basic assumptions around things that usually complicate text like character sets and encoding and such.

Note: I am deliberately ignoring the various attempts at a binary Infoset specification, which has been on the TODO list of many XML working groups in the past and has yet to really make any sort of impact in the industry. Theoretically, yes, XML Infoset-compliant documents could be rendered into a binary format that would have a much smaller, more efficient footprint than the textual representation. If and when we ever get there, it would be interesting to see what the results look like. I'm not holding my breath.

Why, then, did XML take on a role as data-transfer format if, on the surface of things, using text here was such a bad idea?

Interoperability:

"With Web services your accounting departments Win 2k servers billing system can connect with your IT suppliers UNIX server." --http://www.w3schools.com/webservices/ws_why.asp

"Conventional application development often means developing for multiple devices, and that form factors of the client devices can be dramatically different. If you base an application on a web browser display size of 800x600, it would never work on a device with a resolution of 4 lines by 20 characters. Conversely, if you took a lowest common denominator approach and sized for the smaller device, the user interface would be lost on an 800x600 device.Using a non-XML approach, this leaves us writing multiple clients speaking to the server, or writing multiple clients speaking to multiple severs ... Limitations of this approach include:

• Tightly coupled to browser
• Multiple code-bases
• Difficult to adapt to new devices
• Major development efforts
• Slow time to market

"In this case, only one application exists. It runs against the back-end database, and produces an XML stream. A "translator" takes this XML stream, and applies an XSLT transformation to it. Every device could either use a generic XSLT, or have a specialized XSLT that would produce the required device-specific output. The transformation occurs on the server, meaning that no special client capabilities are required.This "hub and spoke" architecture yields tremendous flexibility. When a new device appears, anew spoke can be added to accommodate it. The application itself does not need to be changed, only the translator needs to be informed about the existence of the new device, and which XSLT to use for it." --http://www.topxml.com/conference/wrox/2000_vegas/text/brianl_xml.pdf

Certainly the interoperability argument doesn't require a text-based format, it was just always cited that way. In fact, both the CORBA supporters and the developers over at ZeroC will both agree with Google in suggesting that a binary format can and will be an efficient and effective interoperability format. (I'll let the ZeroC folks talk to the pros and cons of their Ice format as compared to IIOP and SOAP.)

Some of the key inherent advantages in XML that are lost in this new binary format, however, center around the XML Infoset itself and the fact that it has a number of ancillary tools around it, which gets us into the next point; consider some of those inherent advantages in XML that are lost in this new binary, structured, tightly-coupled format:

• XPath. The ability to selectively extract nodes from inside a document is incredibly powerful and highly underutilized by most developers.
• XSLT. Although somewhat on the down-and-out in popularity with developers because of its complexity, XSLT stands as a shining example of how a general-purpose transformation tool can be built once the basic structure is well-understood and independent of the actual domain. (SQL is another.)
• Structureless parsing. In order to use Protocol Buffers, each side must have a copy of the .proto file that generated the proxies. (While it's theoretically possible to build an API that picks through the structure element-by-element in the same way an XML API does, I haven't found such an API in the PB code yet, and doing so would mean spending some quality time with the Protocol Buffer binary encoding format. The same was always true of IIOP or the DCOM MEOW format, too.)

In essence, a Protocol Buffer format consumer is tightly-coupled against the .proto file that it was generated against, whereas in XML we can follow Noah Mendelsohn's advice of years ago ("Schema are relative") and parse XML in whatever manner suits the consumer, with or without schema, without or without schema-based-and-bound proxy code. The advantage to the XML approach, of course, is that it provides a degree of flexibility; the advantage of the Protocol Buffer approach is that the code to produce and consume the elements can be much simpler, and therefore, faster.

Note: it's only fair to point out at this point that the Protocol Buffer approach already contains a certain degree of flexibility that earlier binary formats lacked (if I remember correctly), via PB's use of "optional" vs "required" tags for the various fields. Whether this turns out to be sufficient over time is yet to be decided, though Google claims to be using Protocol Buffers throughout the company for its own internal purposes, which is certainly supporting evidence that cannot be discarded casually.

But there's a corollary effect here, as well: because XML documents are intended to be self-descriptive, the Protocol Buffer format can contain just the data, and leave the format and structure to be enforced by the code on either side of the producer/consumer relationship. Whether you consider this a Good Thing or a Bad Thing probably stands as a good indicator of whether you like the Protocol Buffer approach or the XML approach better.

Note, too, by the way, that many of the XML-based binding APIs can now parse objects out of part of an XML document, as opposed to having to read in the whole thing and then convert--JAXB, JiBX and XMLBeans can all pick up parsing an XML document from any node beyond the initial root element, for example--whereas, at least as of this point (as far as I can tell, and I'd love to have somebody at Google tell me I'm wrong here, because I think it's a major flaw), the Protocol Buffers approach assumes it will read in the entire object from the file. I don't see any way, short of putting developer-specified "separation markers" into the stream or some other kind of encoding or convention, of doing a "partial read" of an object model from a PB data file.

To see what I mean by this, consider the AddressBook example. Suppose the AddressBook holds several thousand records, and my processing system only cares about a select few (less than five, perhaps, who all have the last name "Neward"). In a Protocol Buffer scheme, I deserialize the entire AddressBook, then go through the persons item by item, looking for the one I want. In an XML-based scheme, I can pull-mode parse (StAX in Java, or using the pull-mode XML parser in .NET, for example) the nodes, throwing away nodes until I see one where the <lastName> node contains "Neward", and then JAXB-consume the next n number of nodes into a Person object before continuing through the remainder of the AddressBook.

Let's also note that the Protocol Buffer scheme assumes working with a stream-based (which usually means file-based) storage style for when Protocol Buffers are used as a storage mechanism. But frankly, if I want to store objects, I'd rather use a system that understands objects a bit more deeply than PBs do, and gives me some additional support beyond just input and output. This gets us into the long and involved discussion around object databases, which is another one that's likely to devolve into a shouting match, so I'll leave it at that. Suffice it to say that for object storage, I can see using (for example) db4o-storing-to-a-file as a vastly more long-term solution than I can using PBs, at least for now. (Undoubtedly the benchmarks will be along soon to try and convince us one way or another.) One area that is of particular interest along these lines, though, will be the evolutionary capabilities of each--from my (limited) study of PBs thus far, I believe db4o has a more flexible evolutionary scheme, and I have to admit, I don't like the idea of having to run the codegen step before being able to store my objects, but that's a minor nit that's easily solved with tools like Ant and a global rule saying "Nobody touches the .proto file without checking with me first."

Which, by the way, brings up another problem, the same one that plagues CORBA, COM/DCOM, WSDL-based services, and anything that relies on a shared definition file that is used for code-generation purposes, what I often call The Myth of the One True Schema. Assuming a developer creates a working .proto/.idl/.wsdl definition, and two companies agree on it, what happens when one side wants to evolve or change that definition? Who gets to decide the evolutionary progress of that file? Who "owns" that definition, in effect? And this, of course, presumes that we can even get some kind of definition as to what a "Customer" looks like across the various departments of the company in the first place, much less across companies. Granted, the "optional" tag in PBs help with this, but we're still stuck with an inherently unscalable problem as the number of participants in the system grows.

I'd give a great deal of money to see what the 12,000-odd .proto files look like inside Google, and then again at what they look like in five years, particularly if they are handed out to paying customers as APIs against which to compile and link. There's ways to manage this, of course, but they all look remarkably like the ways we managed them back in the COM/DCOM-vs-CORBA days, too.

Long story short, the Protocol Buffer approach looks like a good one, but let's not let the details get lost in the shouting: Protocol Buffers, as with any binary protocol format and/or RPC mechanism (and I'm not going to go there; the weaknesses of RPC are another debate for another day), are great for those situations where performance is critical and both ends of the system are well-known and controlled. If Google wants to open up their services such that third-parties can call into those systems using the Protocol Buffers approach, then more power to them... but let's not lose sight of the fact that it's yet another proprietary API, and that if Microsoft were to do this, the world would be screaming about "vendor lock-in" and "lack of standards compliance". (In fact, I heard exactly these complaints from Java developers during WCF Q&A when they were told that WCF-to-WCF endpoints could "negotiate up" to a faster, binary, protocol between them.)

In the end, if you want an endpoint that is loosely coupled and offers the maximum flexibility, stick with XML, either wrapped in a SOAP envelope or in a RESTful envelope as dictated by the underlying transport (which means HTTP, since REST over anything else has never really been defined clearly by the Restafarians). If you need a binary format, then Protocol Buffers are certainly one answer... but so is ICE, or even CORBA (though this is fast losing its appeal thanks to the slow decline of the players in this space). Don't lose sight of the technical advantages or disadvantages of each of those solutions just because something has the Google name on it.

The Pragmatic Programmer says, "Learn a new language every year". This is great advice, not just because it puts new tools into your mental toolbox that you can pull out on various occasions to get a job done, but also because it opens your mind to new ideas and new concepts that will filter their way into your code even without explicit language support. For example, suppose you've looked at (J/Iron)Ruby or Groovy, and come to like the "internal iterator" approach as a way of simplifying moving across a collection of objects in a uniform way; for political and cultural reasons, though, you can't write code in anything but Java. You're frustrated, because local anonymous functions (also commonly--and, I think, mistakenly--called closures) are not a first-class concept in Java. Then, you later look at Haskell/ML/Scala/F#, which makes heavy use of what Java programmers would call "static methods" to carry out operations, and realize that this could, in fact, be adapted to Java to give you the "internal iteration" concept over the Java Collections:

   1: package com.tedneward.util;

   2:  

   3: import java.util.*;

   4:  

   5: public interface Acceptor

   6: {

   7:   public void each(Object obj);

   8: }

   9:  

  10: public class Collection

  11: {

  12:   public static void each(List list, Acceptor acc)

  13:   {

  14:     for (Object o : list)

  15:       acc.each(o);

  16:   }

  17: }

Where using it would look like this:

   1: import com.tedneward.util.*;

   2:  

   3: List personList = ...;

   4: Collection.each(new Accpetor() {

   5:   public void each(Object person) {

   6:     System.out.println("Found person " + person + ", isn't that nice?");

   7:   }

   8: });

Is it quite as nice or as clean as using it from a language that has first-class support for anonymous local functions? No, but slowly migrating over to this style has a couple of definitive effects, most notably that you will start grooming the rest of your team (who may be reluctant to pick up these new languages) towards the new ideas that will be present in Groovy, and when they finally do see them (as they will, eventually, unless they hide under rocks on a daily basis), they will realize what's going on here that much more quickly, and start adding their voices to the call to start using (J/Iron)Ruby/Groovy for certain things in the codebase you support.

(By the way, this is so much easier to do in C# 2.0, thanks to generics, static classes and anonymous delegates...

   1: namespace TedNeward.Util

   2: {

   3:   public delegate void EachProc<T>(T obj);

   4:   public static class Collection

   5:   {

   6:     public static void each(ArrayList list, EachProc proc)

   7:     {

   8:       foreach (Object o in list)

   9:         proc(o);

  10:     }

  11:   }

  12: }

  13:  

  14: // ...

  15:  

  16: ArrayList personList = ...;

  17: Collection.each(list, delegate(Object person) {

  18:   System.Console.WriteLine("Found " + person + ", isn't that nice?");

  19: });

... though the collection classes in the .NET FCL are nowhere near as nicely designed as those in the Java Collections library, IMHO. C# programmers take note: spend at least a week studying the Java Collections API.)

This, then, opens the much harder question of, "Which language?" Without trying to infer any sort of order or importance, here's a list of languages to consider, with URLs where applicable; I invite your own suggestions, by the way, as I'm sure there's a lot of languages I don't know about, and quite frankly, would love to. The "current hotness" is to learn the languages marked in bold, so if you want to be daring and different, try one of those that isn't. (I've provided some links, but honestly it's kind of tiring to put all of them in; just remember that Google is your friend, and you should be OK. )

• Visual Basic. Yes, as in Visual Basic--if you haven't played with dynamic languages before, try turning "Option Strict Off", write some code, and see how interacting with the .NET FCL suddenly changes into a duck-typed scenario. If you're really curious, have a look at the generated code in Reflector or ILDasm, and notice how the generated code looks a lot like the generated JVM code from other dynamic languages on an execution environment, a la Groovy.
• Ruby (JRuby, IronRuby):
• Groovy: Some call this "javac 2.0"; I'm not sure it merits that title, or the assumption of the mantle of "King of the JVM" that would seem to go with that title, but the fact is, Groovy's a useful language.
• Scala: A "SCAlable LAnguage" for the JVM (and CLR, though that feature has been left to the community to support), incorporating both object-oriented and functional concepts, plus a few new ideas, into a single package. I'm obviously bullish on Scala, given the talks and articles I've done on it.
• F#: Originally OCaml-on-the-CLR, now F# is starting to take on a personality of its own as Microsoft productizes it. Like Scala and Erlang, F# will be immediately applicable in concurrency scenarios, I think. I'm obviously bullish on F#, given the talks, articles, and book I'm doing on it.
• Erlang: Functional language with a strong emphasis on parallel processing, scalability, and concurrency.
• Perl: People will perhaps be surprised I say this, given my public dislike of Perl's syntax, but I think every programmer should learn Perl, and decide for themselves what's right and what's wrong about Perl. Besides, there's clearly no argument that Perl is one of the power tools in every *nix sysadmin's toolbox.
• Python: Again, given my dislike of Python's significant whitespace, my suggestion to learn it here may surprise some, but Python seems to be stepping into Perl's shoes as the sysadmin language tool of choice, and frankly, lots of people like the significant whitespace, since that's how they format their code anyway.
• C++: The grandaddy of them all, in some ways; if you've never looked at C++ before, you should, particularly what they're doing with templates in the Boost library. As Scott Meyers once put it, "We're a long way from Stack<T>!"
• D: Walter Bright's native-compiling garbage-collected successor to C++/Java/C#.
• Objective-C (part of gcc): Great "other" object-oriented C-based language that never gathered the kind of attention C++ did, yet ended up making its mark on the industry thanks to Steve Jobs' love of the language and its incorporation into the NeXT (and later, Mac OS X) toolchain. Obj-C is a message-passing object language, which has some interesting implications in its own right.
• Common Lisp (Steel Bank Common Lisp): What happens when you create a language that holds as a core principle that the language should hold no clear delineation between "code" and "data"? Or that the syntactic expression of the language should be accessible from within that langauge? You get Lisp, and if you're not sure what I'm talking about, pick up a Lisp or a Scheme implementation and start experimenting.
• Scheme (PLT Scheme, SISC): Scheme is one of the earliest dialects of Lisp, and much of the same syntactic flexibility and power of Lisp is in Scheme, as well. While the syntaxes are usually not directly interchangeable, they're close enough that learning one is usually enough.
• Clojure: Rich Hickey (who also built "dotLisp" for the CLR) has done an amazing job of bringing Lisp to the JVM, including a few new ideas, such as some functional concepts and an implementation of software transactional memory, among other things.
• ECMAScript (E4X, Rhino, ES4): If you've never looking at JavaScript outside of the browser, you're in for a surprise--as Glenn Vanderburg put it during one of his NFJS talks, "There's a real programming language in there!". I'm particularly fond of E4X, which integrates XML as a native primitive type, and the Rhino implementation fully supports it, which makes it attractive to use as an XML services implementation language.
• Haskell (Jaskell): One of the original functional languages. Learning this will give a programmer a leg up on the functional concepts that are creeping into other environments. Jaskell is an implementation of Haskell on the JVM, and they've taken the concept of functional further, creating a build system ("Neptune") on top of Jaskell + Ant, to yield a syntax that's... well... more Haskellian... for building Java projects. (Whether it's better/cleaner than Ant is debatable, but it certainly makes clear the functional nature of build scripts.)
• ML: Another of the original functional languages. Probably don't need to learn this if you learn Haskell, but hey, it can't hurt.
• Heron: Heron is interesting because it looks to take on more of the modeling aspects of programming directly into the language, such as state transitions, which is definitely a novel idea. I'm eagerly looking forward to future drops. (I'm not so interested in the graphical design mode, or the idea of "executable UML", but I think there's a vein of interesting ideas here that could be mined for other languages that aren't quite so lofty in scope.)
• HaXe: A functional language that compiles to three different target platforms: its own (Neko), Flash, and/or Javascript (for use in Web DOMs).
• CAL: A JVM-based statically-typed language from the folks who bring you Crystal Reports.
• E: An interesting tack on distributed systems and security. Not sure if it's production-ready, but it's definitely an eye-opener to look at.
• Prolog: A language built around the idea of logic and logical inference. Would love to see this in play as a "rules engine" in a production system.
• Nemerle: A CLR-based language with functional syntax and semantics, and semantic macros, similar to what we see in Lisp/Scheme.
• Nice: A JVM-based language that permits multi-dispatch methods, sometimes known as multimethods.
• OCaml: An object-functional fusion that was the immediate predecessor of F#. The HaXe and MTASC compilers are both built in OCaml, and frankly, it's in a startlingly small number of lines of code, highlighting how appropriate functional languages are for building compilers and interpreters.
• Smalltalk (Squeak, VisualWorks, Strongtalk): Smalltalk was widely-known as "the O-O language that all the C guys turned to in order to learn how to build object-oriented programs", but very few people at the time understood that Smalltalk was wildly different because of its message-passing and loosely/un-typed semantics. Now we know better (I hope). Have a look.
• TCL (Jacl): Tool Command Language, a procedural scripting language that has some nice embedding capabilities. I'd be curious to try putting a TCL-based language in the hands of end users to see if it was a good DSL base. The Jacl implementation is built on top of the JVM.
• Forth: The original (near as I can tell) stack-based language, in which all execution happens on an execution stack, not unlike what we see in the JVM or CLR. Given how much Lisp has made out of the "atoms and lists" concept, I'm curious if Forth's stack-based approach yields a similar payoff.
• Lua: Dynamically-typed language that lives to be embedded; known for its biggest embedder's popularity: World of Warcraft, along with several other games/game engines. A great demonstration of the power of embedding a language into an engine/environment to allow users to create emergent behavior.
• Fan: Another language that seeks to incorporate both static and dynamic typing, running on top of both the JVM or the CLR.
• Factor: I'm curious about Factor because it's another stack-based language, with a lot of inspiration from some of the other languages on this list.
• Boo: A Python-inspired CLR language that Ayende likes for domain-specific languages.
• Cobra: A Python-inspired language that seeks to encompass both static and dynamic typing into one language. Fascinating stuff.
• Slate: A "prototype-based object-oriented programming language based on Self, CLOS, and Smalltalk-80." Apparently on hold due to loss of interest from the founder, last release was 0.3.5 in August of 2005.
• Joy: Factor's primary inspiration, another stack-based language.
• Raven: A scripting language that "rips off" from Python, Forth, Perl, and the creator's own head.
• Onyx: "Onyx is a powerful stack-based, multi-threaded, interpreted, general purpose programming language similar to PostScript. It can be embedded as an extension language similarly to ficl (Forth), guile (scheme), librep (lisp dialect), s-lang, Lua, and Tcl."
• LOLCode: No, you won't use LOLcode on a project any time soon, but LOLCode has had so many different implementations of it built, it's a great practice tool towards building your own languages, a la DSLs. LOLcode has all the basic components a language would use, so if you can build a parser, AST and execution engine (either interpreter or compiler) for LOLcode, then you've got the basic skills in place to build an external DSL.

There's more, of course, but hopefully there's something in this list to keep you busy for a while. Remember to send me your favorite new-language links, and I'll add them to the list as seems appropriate.

Happy hacking!

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Bruce Wilson, a principal with iLink, and we had a pleasant conversation about enterprise applications and trends and such. Last week, in the middle of my trip to Prague and Zurich, he sent me a link to a blog entry he'd written on using Office as a front-end, and it sort of underscored some ideas I've had around Office in general.

The interesting thing is, most of the ideas he talks about here could just as easily be implemented on top of a Java back-end, or a Ruby back-end, as a .NET back-end. Office is a tool that many end-users "get" right away (whether you agree with Microsoft's user interface metaphors or not, or even like the fact that Office is one of the most widely-installed software packages on the planet), and it has a lot of support infrastructure built in. "Mashup" doesn't have to mean YouTube on your website; in fact, I dislike the term "mashup" entirely, since it sounds like something done in the heat of the moment without any planning or thought (which is the antithesis of anything that goes--or should go--into the enterprise). Can we use the term "cardinality" instead? Please?

One of the things that I like about the idea of building a DSL is the idea of users being able to express, in fairly user-friendly terms, the actions they want to take. For example, Daniel Spiewak has a great example of a DSL built in Scala using Scala's parser combinators, and the resulting text, while certainly not English, is a very readable form. But in of itself, it seems it's been a hard sell to the general community, who look at GUIs as a far more intuitive way of doing things. (Note: I disagree with this; I don't think GUIs are more intuitive, I think GUIs are more self-explanatory, once you've learned a few basic principles, like moving the mouse, clicking the button, and recognizing which elements are clickable and which aren't.)

I think I've finally figured out where an English- (or other human spoken language) driven DSL can be far more powerful and intuitive than a GUI.

Voice. Or, specifically the world of telecommunication devices as a user interface device. Not as "putting-a-GUI-on-a-phone"; I think this is a red herring and ultimately unproductive line of research, iPhones notwithstanding. I mean, literally, talking to the computer.

Imagine a field repair agent, coming off of a repair call, calling back to the office to say the repair was done: "Ticket number 451123, status complete, note Mrs Johnson really needs to stop washing her clothes in the dishwasher." Hanging up, he moves on to the next ticket in the list.

Meanwhile, on the other end, voice-analysis software has done the basic job of transforming words into a line of text, which is fed to the DSL for processing.

Or, the field agent texts the message to a company account, which again passes it directly to the DSL for further processing.

I am firmly convinced that this style of user interface--one we use every day--is the way that mobile devices should interact with enterprise systems. Forget trying to do complex GUIs on a device, forget even trying to simplify down the complex GUI into a simple GUI--just use your voice and a well-understood shared protocol (the DSL itself).

It's the ultimate thin client.

Freshly Twittering

Username is tedneward

Come follow my thoughts

As Amanda notes, I'm riding with 46 other folks (and lots of beer) on a bus from Michigan to devLink in Tennessee, as part of sponsoring the show. (I think she got my language preferences just a teensy bit mixed up, though.)

Which brings up a related point, actually: Amanda (of "the great F# T-shirt" fame from TechEd this year) and I are teaming up to do F# In A Nutshell for O'Reilly. The goal is to have a Rough Cut ready (just the language parts) by the time F# goes CTP this summer or fall, so we're on an accelerated schedule. If you don't see much from me via the blog for a while, now you know why. Once that's done, I'm going dark on a Scala book to follow--details to follow when that contract is nailed down.

Meanwhile.... As she suggests, the bus will likely be filled with lots of lively debate. The nice thing about having a technical debate with drunk geeks on a bus traveling down the highway at speed is that it's actually pretty easy to win the debate, if you really want to:

"You are such an idiot! Object-relashunal mappers are just... *burp* so cool! Why can't you see that?"

"Idiot, am I? I demand satisfaction! Step outside, sir!"

"Fine, you--" WHOOSH ... THUMP-THUMP....

"Next?"

I'm looking forward to this.

Editor's note: (Contact Amanda if you're interested in participating on the devLink bus, not the book. Thanks for the interest, but we aren't soliciting co-authors. We think we have this one pretty well covered, but we're always interested in reviewers--for that, you can contact either of us.)

From the "This is a First" Department....

While sitting in the Northwest WorldClubs lounge on my way to TechEd2008, I discovered that Sun is discontinuing their Sun Developer Express program (which I find a bummer--I think they should have done the opposite, in fact, and ramped it up even further, creating a preconfigured/prestocked image with all the open-source tools they do, like OpenJDK and Postgres, ready to build/hack inside it) in favor of their OpenSolaris initiative. Officially, SXDE "goes away" in July, and the download links will automatically forward over to OpenSolaris.org.

OK, fine. Go visit that site.

Ugh, bummer: no prebuilt VMWare images anywhere on the site. That, to me, was the golden apogee of the SXDE program, because it meant that with a single download (granted, of 2GB in size) I could have a nearly-complete Java development environment up and running with almost no work on my part. Now I'm going to have to build an image of my own, and put all the tools (Sun Studio, NetBeans, various JDK images, whatever's not part of the OpenSolaris install) into a base image, and possibly do this over and over again as they release new OpenSolaris releases. Crud.

Whatever.

I download the ISO from the OpenSolaris site (kudos to Northwest for fat pipes in their lounge!), and it finishes just as it's time to walk (jog/brisk-walk might be more appropriate--I was cutting a tad bit close) to the gate. I hop on the flight, take my seat. Turns out, we have about ten or fifteen minutes before we're off the ground, so I pop open the MacBook Pro, flip over to VMWare Fusion, create a new VM, and being the operating system install. I just finish with some of the basics when it's time to go, so I close the lid, and once we hit 10,000 feet, I pop it back open again and let the thing whir away at the drive.

And that's when it hits me.

I'm doing an operating system install. On my laptop. In a virtual machine image. Using an ISO I downloaded while at the airport. And I'm writing this blog post as I do it.

I find that incredibly cool.

I don't know about you, but forget mashups and Web 2.0, I think virtualization stands out as the most important technical innovation of the decade.

I've been asked to put together a list of the "best" Java resources that every up-and-coming Java developer should have, and I'd like this list to be as comprehensive as possible and, more importantly, reflect more than just my own opinion. So, either through comments or through email, let me know what you think the best Java resources are in the following categories:

• Websites and developer Web portals
• Weblogs/RSS feeds. (Not all have to be hand-authored blogs--if you find an RSS feed for news on java.net projects, for example, that would count as well.)
• Java packages and/or libaries. (Either those within Java Standard Edition--a la Reflection or the Scripting API--or from Enterprise Edition--a la JMS--or even third-party packages, a la Spring.)
• Conferences, even including those that I don't speak at.
• Books.
• Tools. (IDEs, build tools, static analysis tools, either commercial or open source.)
• Future trends you think bear watching.

There is, of course, no prize to be won here, and I'd please ask the vendors (commercial or open source) who watch my blog to avoid outright advertisements in comments (though you are free to rattle off the various advantages of your product in an email to me), in order to avoid turning this weblog into a gigantic row of billboards along the freeway. I am interested in peoples' opinions, however, and more importantly, why you think X should be on that list, or even why Y shouldn't. Keep it civil, though, please--I'll delete any comments that get too vindictive or offensive. (That doesn't mean that you have to agree with me--just avoid calling anybody names. Basic 'Netiquette.)

Oh, and if you want to be mentioned in the article (which will be published on an international developer site), please indicate how you'd like to be accredited. Or not. Whatever you prefer.

Sometimes people ask me why I don't put more "personal" details in my blogs--those who know me know that I'm generally pretty outspoken on a number of topics ranging far beyond that of simple technology. While sometimes those opinions do manage to leak their way here, for the most part, I try to avoid the taboo topics (politics/sex/religion, among others) here in an effort to keep things technically focused. Or, at least, as technically focused as I can, anyway.

But there've been some other reasons I've avoided the public spotlight on my non-technical details, too.

This essay from the New York Times (which may require registration, I'm not sure) captures, in some ways, the things that anyone who blogs should consciously consider before blogging: when you blog, you are putting yourself out into the public eye in a way that we as a society have never had before. In prior generations, it was always possible to "hide" from the world around us by simply not taking the paths that lead to public exposure--no photos, no quotations in the newspaper, and so on. Now, thanks to Google, anybody can find you with a few keystrokes.

In some ways, it's funny--the Internet creates a layer of anonymity, and yet, takes it away at the same time. (There has to be a sociology or psychology master's thesis in there, waiting to be researched and written. Email me if you know of one?)

Ah, right. The point. Must get back to the point.

As you read peoples' blogs and consider commenting on what you've read, I implore you, remember that on the other end of that blog is a real person, with feelings and concerns and yes, in most cases, that same feeling of inadequacy that plagues us all. What you say in your comments can and will, no matter how slight, either raise them up, or else wound them. Sometimes, if you're particularly vitriolic about it, you can even induce that "blogging burnout" Emily mentions in her essay.

And, in case you were wondering: Yep, that goes for me, too. You, dear reader, can make me feel like shit, if you put your mind to it strongly enough.

That doesn't mean I don't want comments or am suddenly afraid of being rejected online--far from it. I post here the thoughts and ideas that yes, I believe in, but also because I want to see if others believe in them. In the event others don't, I want to hear their criticism and hear their logic as they find the holes in the argument. Sometimes I even agree with the contrary opinion, or find merit in going back to revisit my thinking on the subject--case in point, right now I'm going back to look at Erlang more deeply to see if Steve is right. (Thus far, cruising through some Erlang code, looking at Erlang's behavior in a debugger, and walking my way through various parts of the BEAM engine, I still think Erlang's fabled support for robustness and correctness--none of which I disagreed with, by the way--comes mostly from the language, not the execution engine, for whatever that's worth. And apparently I'm not the only one. But that's neither here nor there--Steve thinks he's right, and I doubt any words of mine would change his opinion on that, judging from the tone of his posts on the matter. *shrug* Fortunately, I'm far more concerned with correcting my own understanding in the event of incorrectness than I am anybody else's. )

In any event, to those of you who are curious as to the more personal details, I'm sorry, but they're not going to show up here any time soon. If you're that curious, find me at a conference, introduce yourself, buy me a glass of red wine (Zinfandel's always good) or Scotch, double neat (Macallan 18, or maybe a 25 if you're asking really personal stuff), and let's settle into some comfy chairs and talk.

That's always a far more enjoyable experience than typing at the keyboard.

I've gotten a couple of emails about this, and it's finally crossed the threshold to deserve a blog post. If you want to subscribe to the complete feed (not restricted by category), the URL you want is http://blogs.tedneward.com/SyndicationService.asmx/GetRss. It was only after the most recent email that I realized there's no link for it on the blog template; sorry about that, all.

For those of you who aren't from that side of the world, you might find it... inspirational... to see what life at Microsoft is really like. (And I can vouch for some of these myself, having spent some time inside those buildings....)

Steve Yegge posted the transcript from a talk on dynamic languages that he gave at Stanford.

Cedric Beust posted a response to Steve's talk, espousing statically-typed languages.

Numerous comments and flamewars erupted, not to mention a Star Wars analogy (which always makes things more fun).

This is my feeble attempt to play galactic peacemaker. Or at least galactic color commentary and play-by-play. I have no doubts about its efficacy, and that it will only fan the flames, for that's how these things work. Still, I feel a certain perverse pleasure in pretending, so....

Enjoy the carnage that results.

First of all, let me be very honest: I like Steve's talk. I think he does a pretty good job of representing the negatives and positives of dynamic languages, though there are obviously places where I'm going to disagree:

• "Because we all know that C++ has some very serious problems, that organizations, you know, put hundreds of staff years into fixing. Portability across compiler upgrades, across platforms, I mean the list goes on and on and on. C++ is like an evolutionary sort of dead-end. But, you know, it's fast, right?" Funny, I doubt Bjarne Stroustrup or Herb Sutter would agree with the "evolutionary dead-end" statement, but they're biased, so let's put that aside for a moment. Have organizations put hundreds of staff years into fixing the problems of C++? Possibly--it would be good to know what Steve considers the "very serious problems" of C++, because that list he does give (compiler/platform/language upgrades and portability across platforms) seems problematic regardless of the langauge or platform you choose--Lord knows we saw that with Java, and Lord knows we see it with ECMAScript in the browser, too. The larger question should be, can, and does, the language evolve? Clearly, based on the work in the Boost libraries and the C++0X standards work, the answer is yes, every bit as much as Java or C#/.NET is, and arguably much more so than what we're seeing in some of the dynamic languages. C++ is getting a standardized memory model, which will make a portable threading package possible, as well as lambda expressions, which is a far cry from the language that I grew up with. That seems evolutionary to me. What's more, Bjarne has said, point-blank, that he prefers taking a slow approach to adopting new features or ideas, so that it can be "done right", and I think that's every bit a fair position to take, regardless of whether I agree with it or not. (I'd probably wish for a faster adoption curve, but that's me.) Oh, and if you're thinking that C++'s problems stem from its memory management approach, you've never written C++ with a garbage collector library.
• "And so you ask them, why not use, like, D? Or Objective-C. And they say, "well, what if there's a garbage collection pause?" " Ah, yes, the "we fear garbage collection" argument. I would hope that Java and C#/.NET have put that particular debate to rest by now, but in the event that said dragon's not yet slain, let's do so now: GC does soak up some cycles, but for the most part, for most applications, the cost is lost in the noise of everything else. As with all things performance related, however, profile.
• "And so, you know, their whole argument is based on these fallacious, you know, sort of almost pseudo-religious... and often it's the case that they're actually based on things that used to be true, but they're not really true anymore, and we're gonna get to some of the interesting ones here." Steve, almost all of these discussions are pseudo-religious in nature. For some reason, programmers like to identify themselves in terms of the language they use, and that just sets up the religious nature of the debate from the get-go.
• "You know how there's Moore's Law, and there are all these conjectures in our industry that involve, you know, how things work. And one of them is that languages get replaced every ten years. ... Because that's what was happening up until like 1995. But the barriers to adoption are really high." I can't tell from the transcript of Steve's talk if this is his opinion, or that this is a conjecture/belief of the industry; in either case, I thoroughly disagree with this sentiment--the barriers to entry to create your own language have never been lower than today, and various elements of research work and available projects just keep making it easier and easier to do, particularly if you target one of the available execution engines. Now, granted, if you want your language to look different from the other languages out there, or if you want to do some seriously cool stuff, yes, there's a fair amount of work you still have to do... but that's always going to be the case. As we find ways to make it easier to build what's "cool" today, the definition of what's "cool" rises in result. (Nowhere is this more clear than in the game industry, for example.) Moore's Law begets Ballmer's Corollary: User expectations double every eighteen months, requiring us to use up all that power trying to meet those expectations with fancier ways of doing things.
• It's a section that's too long to quote directly here, but Steve goes on to talk about how programmers aren't using these alternative languages, and that if you even suggest trying to use D or Scala or [fill in the blank], you're going to get "lynched for trying to use a language that the other engineers don't know. ... And [my intern] is, like, "well I understand the argument" and I'm like "No, no, no! You've never been in a company where there's an engineer with a Computer Science degree and ten years of experience, an architect, who's in your face screaming at you, with spittle flying on you, because you suggested using, you know... D. Or Haskell. Or Lisp, or Erlang, or take your pick." " Steve, with all due respect to your experience, I know plenty of engineers and companies who are using some of these "alternative" languages, and they're having some good success. But frankly, if you work in a company where an architect is "in your face screaming at you, with spittle flying on you", frankly, it's time to move on, because that company is never going to try anything new. Period. I don't care if we're talking about languages, Spring, agile approaches, or trying a new place for lunch today. Companies get into a rut just as much as individuals do, and if the company doesn't challenge that rut every so often, they're going to get bypassed. Period, end of story. That doesn't mean trying every new thing under the sun on your next "mission-critical" project, but for God's sake, Mr. CTO, do you really want to wait until your competition has bypassed you before adopting something new? There's a lot of project work that goes on that has room for some experimentation and experience-gathering before utilizing something on the next big project.
• "I made the famously, horribly, career-shatteringly bad mistake of trying to use Ruby at Google, for this project. ... And I became, very quickly, I mean almost overnight, the Most Hated Person At Google. And, uh, and I'd have arguments with people about it, and they'd be like Nooooooo, WHAT IF... And ultimately, you know, ultimately they actually convinced me that they were right, in the sense that there actually were a few things. There were some taxes that I was imposing on the systems people, where they were gonna have to have some maintenance issues that they wouldn't have [otherwise had]. Those reasons I thought were good ones." Recognizing the cost of deploying a new platform into the IT sphere is a huge deal that programmers frequently try to ignore in their zeal to adopt something new, and as a result, IT departments frequently swing the other way, resisting all change until it becomes inevitable. This is where running on top of one of the existing execution environments (the JVM or the CLR in particular) becomes so powerful--the actual deployment platform doesn't change, and the IT guys remain more or less disconnected from the whole scenario. This is the principal advantage JRuby and IronPython and Jython and IronRuby will have over their native-interpreted counterparts. As for maintenance issues, aside from the "somebody's gonna have to learn this language" tax (which is a real tax but far less costly, I believe, than most people think it to be), I'm not sure what issues would crop up--the IT guys don't usually change your Java or C# or Visual Basic code in production, do they?
• Steve then gets into the discussion about tools around dynamic languages, and I heartily agree with him: the tool vendors have a much deeper toolchest than we (non-tool vendor programmers) give them credit for, and they're proving it left and right as IDEs get better and better for dynamic languages like Groovy and Ruby. In some areas, though, I think we as developers lean too strongly against our tools, expecting them to be able to do the thinking for us, and getting all grumpy when they can't or don't. Granted, I don't want to give up my IntelliJ any time soon, but let's think about this for a second: if I can't program Java today without IntelliJ, then is that my fault, the language's fault, the industry's fault, or some combination thereof? Or is it maybe just a fact of progress? (Would anybody consider building assembly language in Notepad today? Does that make assembly language wrong? Or just the wrong tool for the job?)
• Steve's point about how Java IDE's miss the Reflective case is a good one, and one that every Java programmer should consider. How much of your Java (or C# or C++) code actually isn't capturable directly in the IDE?
• Steve then goes into the ubiquitous Java-generics rant, and I'll have to admit, he's got some good points here--why didn't we (Java, though this applies just as equally to C#) just let the runtime throw the exception when the cast fails, and otherwise just let things go? My guess is that there's probably some good rationale that presumes you already accept the necessity of more verbose syntax in exchange for knowing where the cast might potentially fail, even though there's plenty of other places in the language where exceptions can be thrown without that verbose syntax warning you of that fact, array indexers being a big one. One thing I will point out, however, in what I believe is a refutation of what Steve's suggesting in this discussion: from my research in the area and my memory about the subject from way back when, the javac compiler really doesn't do much in the way of optimizations, and hasn't tried since about JDK 1.1, for the precise reason he points out: the JITter's going to optimize all this stuff anyway, so it's easier to just relax and let the JITter do the heavy lifting.
• The discussion about optimizations is interesting, and while I think he glosses over some issues and hyper-focuses on others, two points stand out, in my mind: performance hits often come from places you don't expect, and that micro-benchmarks generally don't prove much of anything. Sometimes that hit will come from the language, and sometimes that hit will come from something entirely differently. Profile first. Don't let your intuition get in the way, because your intuition sucks. Mine does, too, by the way--there's just too many moving parts to be able to keep it all straight in your head.

Steve then launches into a series of Q&A with the audience, but we'll let the light dim on that stage, and turn our attention over to Cedric's response.

• "... the overall idea is that dynamically typed languages are on the rise and statically typed languages are on their way out." Actually, the transcript I read seemed to imply that Steve thought that dynamically typed languages are cool but that nobody will use them for a variety of reasons, some of which he agreed with. I thoroughly disagree with Steve's conclusion there, by the way, but so be it ...
• "I'm happy to be the Luke Skywalker to his Darth Vader. ... Evil shall not prevail." Yes, let's not let this debate fall into the pseudo-religious category, shall we? Fully religious debates have such a better track record of success, so let's just make it "good vs evil", in order to ensure emotions get all neatly wrapped throughout. Just remember, Cedric, even Satan can quote the Bible... and it was Jesus telling us that, so if you disagree with anything I say below you must be some kind of Al-Qaeda terrorist. Or something.
  • [Editor's note: Oh, shit, he did NOT just call Cedric a terrorist and a Satanist and invoke the name of Christ in all this. Time to roll out the disclaimer... "Ladies and gentlemen, the views and opinions expressed in this blog entry...."]
  • [Author's note: For the humor-challenged in the crowd, no I do not think Cedric is a terrorist. I like Cedric, and hopefully he still likes me, too. Of course, I have also been accused of being the Antichrist, so what that says about Cedric I'm not sure.]
• Cedric on Scala:
  • "Have you taken a look at implicits? Seriously? Just when I thought we were not just done realizing that global variables are bad, but we have actually come up with better ways to leverage the concept with DI frameworks such as Guice, Scala knocks the wind out of us with implicits and all our hardly earned knowledge about side effects is going down the drain again." Umm.... Cedric? One reaction comes to mind here, and it's best expressed as.... WTF?!? Implicits are not global variables or DI, they're more a way of doing conversions, a la autoboxing but more flexible. I agree that casual use of implicits can get you in trouble, but I'd have thought Scala's "there are no operators just methods with funny names" would be the more disconcerting of the two.
  • "As for pattern matching, it makes me feel as if all the careful data abstraction that I have built inside my objects in order to isolate them from the unforgiving world are, again, thrown out of the window because I am now forced to write deconstructors to expose all this state just so my classes can be put in a statement that doesn't even have the courtesy to dress up as something that doesn't smell like a switch/case..." I suppose if you looked at pattern-matching and saw nothing more than a switch/case, then I'd agree with you, but it turns out that pattern-matching is a lot more powerful than just being a switch/case. I think what Cedric's opposing is the fact that pattern-matching can actually bind to variables expressed in the individual match clauses, which might look like deconstructors exposing state... but that's not the way they get used, from what I've seen thus far. But, hey, just because the language offers it, people will use it wrongly, right? So God forbid a language's library should allow me to, say, execute private methods or access private fields....
• Cedric on the difficulty to impose a non-mainstream language in the industry: "Let me turn the table on you and imagine that one of your coworkers comes to you and tells you that he really wants to implement his part of the project in this awesome language called Draco. How would you react? Well, you're a pragmatic kind of guy and even though the idea seems wacky, I'm sure you would start by doing some homework (which would show you that Draco was an awesome language used back in the days on the Amiga). Reading up on Draco, you realize that it's indeed a very cool language that has some features that are a good match for the problem at hand. But even as you realize this, you already know what you need to tell that guy, right? Probably something like "You're out of your mind, go back to Eclipse and get cranking". And suddenly, you've become *that* guy. Just because you showed some common sense." If, I suppose, we equate "common sense" with "thinking the way Cedric does", sure, that makes sense. But you know, if it turned out that I was writing something that targeted the Amiga, and Draco did, in fact, give us a huge boost on the competition, and the drawbacks of using Draco seemed to pale next to the advantages of using it, then... Well, gawrsh, boss, it jus' might make sense to use 'dis har Draco thang, even tho it ain't Java. This is called risk mitigation, and frankly, it's something too few companies go through because they've "standardized" on a language and API set across the company that's hardly applicable to the problem at hand. Don't get me wrong--you don't want the opposite extreme, which is total anarchy in the operations center as people use any and all languages/platforms available to them on a willy-nilly basis, but the funny thing is, this is a continuum, not a binary switch. This is where languages-on-execution-engines (like the JVM or CLR) gets such a great win-win condition: IT can just think in terms of supporting the JVM or CLR, and developers can then think in whatever language they want, so long it compiles/runs on those platforms.
• Cedric on building tools for dynamic languages: "I still strongly disagree with that. It is different *and* harder (and in some cases, impossible). Your point regarding the fact that static refactoring doesn't cover 100% of the cases is well taken, but it's 1) darn close to 100% and 2) getting closer to it much faster than any dynamic tool ever could. By the way, Java refactorings correcting comments, XML and property files are getting pretty common these days, but good luck trying to perform a reliable method renaming in 100 Ruby files." I'm not going to weigh in here, since I don't write tools for either dynamic or static languages, but watching what the IntelliJ IDEA guys are doing with Groovy, and what the NetBeans guys are doing with Ruby, I'm more inclined to believe in what Steve thinks than what Cedric does. As for the "reliable method renaming in 100 Ruby files", I don't know this for a fact, but I'll be willing to be that we're a lot closer to that than Cedric thinks we are. (I'd love to hear comments from somebody neck-deep in the Ruby crowd who's done this and their experience doing so.)
• Cedric on generics: "I no longer bother trying to understand why complex Generic examples are so... well, darn complex. Yes, it's pretty darn hard to follow sometimes, but here are a few points for you to ponder:
  • 90% of the Java programmers (including myself) only ever use Generics for Collections.
  • These same programmers never go as far as nesting two Generic declarations.
  • For API developers and users alike, Generics are a huge progress.
  • Scala still requires you to understand covariance and contravariance (but with different rules. People seem to say that Scala's rules are simpler, I'm not so sure, but not interested in finding out for the aforementioned reasons)."
  Honestly, Cedric, the fact that 90% of the Java programmers are only using generics for collections doesn't sway me in the slightest. 90% of the world's population doesn't use Calculus, either, but that doesn't mean that it's not useful, or that we shouldn't be trying to improve our understanding of it and how to do useful things with it. After looking at what the C++ community has done with templates (the Boost libraries) and what .NET is doing with its generic system (LINQ and F# to cite two examples), I think Java missed a huge opportunity with generics. Type erasure may have made sense in a world where Java was the only practical language on top of the JVM, but in a world that's coming to accept Groovy and JRuby and Scala as potential equals on the JVM, it makes no sense whatsoever. Meanwhile, when thinking about Scala, let's take careful note that a Scala programmer can go a long way with the langauge before having to think about covariance, contravariance, upper and lower type bounds, simpler or not. (For what it's worth, I agree with you, I'm not sure if they're simpler, either.)
• Cedric on dynamic language performance: "What will keep preventing dynamically typed languages from displacing statically typed ones in large scale software is not performance, it's the simple fact that it's impossible to make sense of a giant ball of typeless source files, which causes automatic refactorings to be unreliable, hence hardly applicable, which in turn makes developers scared of refactoring. And it's all downhill from there. Hello bit rot." There's a certain circular logic here--if we presume that IDEs can't make sense of "typeless source files" (I wasn't aware that any source file was statically typed, honestly--this must be something Google teaches), then it follows that refactoring will be impossible or at least unreliable, and thus a giant ball of them will be unmanageable. I disagree with Cedric's premise--that IDEs can't make sense of dynamic language code--so therefore I disagree with the entire logical chain as a result. What I don't disagree with is the implicit presumption that the larger the dynamic language source base, the harder it is to keep straight in your head. In fact, I'll even amend that statement further: the larger the source base (dynamic or otherwise), the harder it is to keep straight in your head. Abstractions are key to the long-term success of any project, so the language I work with had best be able to help me create those abstractions, or I'm in trouble once I cross a certain threshold. That's true regardless of the language: C++, Java, C#, Ruby, or whatever. That's one of the reasons I'm spending time trying to get my head around Lisp and Scheme, because those languages were all about building abstractions upon abstractions upon abstractions, but in libraries, rather than in the language itself, so they could be swapped out and replaced with something else when the abstractions failed or needed evolution.
• Cedric on program unmaintainability: "I hate giving anecdotal evidence to support my points, but that won't stop me from telling a short story that happened to me just two weeks ago: I found myself in this very predicament when trying to improve a Ruby program that 1) I just wrote a few days before and 2) is 200 lines long. I was staring at an object, trying to remember what it does, failing, searching manually in emacs where it was declared, found it as a "Hash", and then realized I still had no idea what the darn thing is. You see my point..." Ain't nothing wrong with anecdotal evidence, Cedric. We all have it, and if we all examine it en masse, some interesting patterns can emerge. Funny thing is, I've had exactly the same experience with C++ code, Java code, and C# code. What does that tell you? It tells me that I probably should have cooked up some better abstractions for those particular snippets, and that's what I ended up doing. As a matter of fact, I just helped a buddy of mine untangle some Ruby code to turn it into C#, and despite the fact that he's never written (or read) a Ruby program in his life, we managed to flip it over to C# in a couple of hours, including the execution of Ruby code blocks (I love anonymous methods) stored in a string-keyed hash within an array. And this was Ruby code that neither of us had ever seen before, much less written it a few days prior.
• Cedric (and Steve) on error messages: "[Steve said] And the weird thing is, I realized early in my career that I would actually rather have a runtime error than a compile error. [Cedric responded] You probably already know this, but you drew the wrong conclusion. You didn't want a runtime error, you wanted a clear error. One that doesn't lie to you, like CFront (and a lot of C++ compilers even today, I hear) used to spit in our faces. And once I have a clear error message, I much prefer to have it as early as possible, thank you very much." Honestly, I agree with Cedric here: I would much prefer errors before execution, as early as possible, so that there's less chance of my users finding the errors I haven't found yet. And I agree that some of the error messages we sometimes get are pretty incomprehensible, particularly from the C++ compiler during template expansion. But how is that different from the ubiquitous Java "ClassCastException: Cannot cast Person to Person" that arises from time to time? Once you know what the message is telling you, it's easy to know how to fix it, but getting to the point of knowing what the error message is telling you requires a good working understanding of Java ClassLoaders. Do we really expect that any tool--static or dynamic, compiler or runtime, is going to be able to produce error messages that somehow precludes the need to have the necessary background to understand it? All errors are relative to the context from which they are born. If you lack that context, the error message, no matter how well-written or phrased, is useless.
• Cedric on "The dynamic nuclear winter": "[Steve said] And everybody else went and chased static. And they've been doing it like crazy. And they've, in my opinion, reached the theoretical bounds of what they can deliver, and it has FAILED. [Cedric responded] Quite honestly, words fail me here." Wow. Just... wow. I can't agree with Steve at all, that static(ically typed languages) has FAILED, or that they've reached the theoretical bounds of what they can deliver, but neither can I say with complete confidence that statically-typed languages are The Way Forward, either. I think, for the time, chasing statically-typed languages was the right thing to do, because for a long time we were in a position where programmer time was cheaper than computer time; now, I believe that this particular metric has flipped, and that it's time we started thinking about what the costs of programmer time really are. (Frankly, I'd love to see a double-blind study on this, but I've no idea how one would carry that out in a scientific manner.)

So.... what's left?

Oh, right: if Steve/Vader is Cedric/Luke's father, then who is Cedric/Luke's sister, and why is she wearing a copper-wire bikini while strangling the Haskell/ML crowd/Jabba the Hutt?

Maybe this whole Star Wars analogy thing was a bad idea.

Look, at the end of the day, the whole static-vs-dynamic thing is a red herring. It doesn't matter. The crucial question is whether or not the language being used does two things, and how well it does them:

1. Provide the ability to express the concept in your head, and
2. Provide the ability to evolve as the concepts in your head evolve

There are certain things that are just impossible to do in C++, for example. I cannot represent the C++ AST inside the program itself. (Before you jump all over me, C++ers of the world, take careful note: I'm not saying that C++ cannot represent an AST, but an AST of itself, at the time it is executing.) This is something dynamic languages--most notably Lisp, but also other languages, including Ruby--do pretty well, because they're building the AST at runtime anyway, in order to execute the code in the first place. Could C++ do this? Perhaps, but the larger question is, would any self-respecting C++ programmer want to? Look at your average Ruby program--80% to 90% (the number may vary, but most of the Rubyists I talk to agree its somewhere in this range) of the program isn't really using the meta-object capabilities of the language, and is just a "simpler/easier/scarier/unchecked" object language. Most of the weird-*ss Rubyisms don't show up in your average Ruby program, but are buried away in some library someplace, and away from the view of the average Ruby programmer.

Keep the simple things simple, and make the hard things possible. That' should be the overriding goal of any language, library, or platform.

Erik Meijer coined this idea first, and I like it a lot: Why can't we operate on a basic principle of "static when we can (or should), dynamic otherwise"? (Reverse that if it makes you feel better: "dynamic when we can, static otherwise", because the difference is really only one of gradation. It's also an interesting point for discussion, just how much of each is necessary/desirable.) Doing this means we get the best of both worlds, and we can stop this Galactic Civil War before anybody's planet gets blown up.

'Cuz that would suck.

Steve Vinoski thinks to deflate my arguments with suppositions and presumptions, which I cannot simply let stand.

(Sorry, Steve-O, but I think you're out in left field on this one. I'm happy to argue it further with you over beer, but if you want the last word, have at it, and we'll compare scores when we run into each other at the next conference.)

Steve first takes aim at my comparison of the Erlang process model to the *nix process model:

First, Ted says:

Erlang’s reliability model–that is, the spawn-a-thousand-processes model–is not unique to Erlang. In fact, it’s been the model for Unix programs and servers, most notably the Apache web server, for decades. When building a robust system under Unix, a master-slave model, in which a master process spawns (and monitors) n number of child processes to do the actual work, offers that same kind of reliability and robustness. If one of these processes fail (due to corrupted memory access, operating system fault, or what-have-you), the process can simply die and be replaced by a new child process.

There’s really no comparison between the UNIX process model (which BTW I hold in very high regard) and Erlang’s approach to achieving high reliability. They are simply not at all the same, and there’s no way you can claim that UNIX “offers that same kind of reliability and robustness” as Erlang can. If it could, wouldn’t virtually every UNIX process be consistently yielding reliability of five nines or better?

What Steve misses here is that just because something can, doesn't mean it does. Processes in *nix are just as vulnerable to bad coding practices as are processes in Windows or Mac OS X, and let's be very clear: the robustness and reliability of a system is entirely held hostage to the skill and care of the worst programmer on the system. There is a large difference between theory and practice, Steve, and whether somebody takes *nix up on that offer depends a great deal on how much they're interested in building robust and reliable software.

This is where a system's architecture becomes so important--architecture leads developers down a particular path, enabling them to fall into what Rico Mariani once described as "the pit of success", or what I like to call "correctness by default". Windows leads developers down a single-process/multi-thread-based model, and UNIX leads developers down a multi-process-based model. Which one seems more robust and reliable by default to you?

(By the way, Erlang's model is apparently neither processes nor threads; according to Wikipedia's entry on Erlang,

Erlang processes are neither operating system processes nor operating system threads, but lightweight processes somewhat similar to Java's original “green threads”. Like operating system processes (and unlike green threads and operating system threads) they have no shared state between them.

Now, I grant you, Wikipedia is about as accurate as graffiti scrawled on the wall, but if that's an incorrect summation, please point me to the documentation that contradicts this and let's fix the Wikipedia entry while we're at it. But in the meantime, assuming this is correct, it means that Erlang's model is similar to the CLR's AppDomain construct, which has been around since .NET 1.0, and Java's proposed "Isolate" feature which has yet to be implemented.)

(Oh, and if the argument here is that Erlang's reliability comes from its lack of shared state between threads, hell, man, that's hardly a difficult architecture to cook up. Most transactional systems get there pretty easily, including EJB, though then programmers then go through dozens of hoops to try and break it.)

Next, Steve makes some interesting fundamental assumptions about "high reliability":

Obviously, achieving high reliability requires at least two computers. On those systems, what part of the UNIX process model allows a process on one system to seamlessly fork child processes on another and monitor them over there? Yes, there are ways to do it, but would anyone claim they are as reliable and robust as Erlang’s approach? I sure wouldn’t. Also, UNIX pipes provide IPC for processes on the same host, but what about communicating with processes on other hosts? Yes, there are many, many ways to achieve that as well — after all, I’ve spent most of my career working on distributed computing systems, so I’m well aware of the myriad choices here — but that’s actually a problem in this case: too many choices, too many trade-offs, and far too many ways to get it wrong. Erlang can achieve high reliability in part because it solves these issues, and a whole bunch of other related issues such as live code upgrade/downgrade, extremely well.

I think you're making some serious assumptions about the definition of "high reliability" here, Steve--building reliable software no more depends on having at least two computers as it does having at least two power sources, two network infrastructures, or two continents. Obviously, the more reliable you want to get with your software, the more redundancy you want to have, but that's a continuum, and one man's "high" reliability is another man's "low" reliability. Often, having just two processes running is redundant enough to get the job done.

As for UNIX's process model making it seamless to fork child processes "over there" and monitor them "over here", I know other languages that have supported precisely that since 1995, SR (Synchronizing Resources) being one of them. (SR later was adapted to the JVM to become JR, and the reason I'm aware of them is because I took a couple of classes from both langauges' creator, Ron Olsson, from UC Davis.)

Frankly, I think Steve's reaching with this argument--there's no reasoning here, just "I sure wouldn't [claim that they are as reliable and robust as Erlang's approach]" as persuasion. You like Erlang's ability to spin off child processes, Steve, and that's fine, but let's not pretend that Erlang's doing anything incredibly novel here--it's just taking the UNIX model and incorporating it directly into the language.

And that's part of the problem--any time we incorporate something directly as part of the language, there's all kinds of versioning and revision issues that come with it. This, to my mind, is one of Scala's (and F#'s and Lisp's and Clojure's and Scheme's and other composite languages') greatest strengths, the ability to create constructs that look like they're part of the language, but in fact come from libraries. Libraries are much much easier to revise and adapt right now, largely because we know how to do it, at least compared against what we know about how to do it with languages.

Next, Steve hollers at me for being apparently inconsistent:

Ted continues:

There is no reason a VM (JVM, CLR, Parrot, etc) could not do this. In fact, here’s the kicker: it would be easier for a VM environment to do this, because VM’s, by their nature, seek to abstract away the details of the underlying platform that muddy up the picture.

In your original posting, Ted, you criticized Erlang for having its own VM, yet here you say that a VM approach can yield the best solution for this problem. Aren’t you contradicting yourself?

I do criticize Erlang for having its own VM (though I think it's not a VM, it's an interpreter, which is a far cry from an actual VM), and yet I do believe the VMs can yield the best solution for the problem. The key here is simple: how much energy has gone into making the VM fast, robust, scalable, manageable, monitorable, and so on? The JVM and the CLR have (literally) thousands of man-months sunk into them to reach high levels in all those areas. Can Erlang claim the same? How do I tune Erlang's GC? How do I find out if Erlang's GC is holding objects longer than it should? How do I discover if an Erlang process is about to die due to a low-memory condition? Can I hold objects inside of a weak reference in Erlang? All of these were things developed in the JVM and CLR in response to real customer problems, and once done, were available to any and all languages that run on top of that platform. In order to keep up, Erlang must sink a significant amount of effort into these same scenarios, and I'm willing to bet that Erlang didn't get feature "X" unless Ericsson ran into the need for it themselves.

By the way, the same argument applies to Ruby, at least until you start talking about JRuby or IronRuby. Ditto for Python up until IronPython or Jython (both of which, I understand, now run faster than the native C Python interpreter).

Steve continues attacking my VM-based arguments:

It would be relatively simple to take an Actors-based Java application, such as that currently being built in Scala, and move it away from a threads-based model and over to a process-based model (with the JVM constuction[sic]/teardown being handled entirely by underlying infrastructure) with little to no impact on the programming model.

Would it really be “relatively simple?” Even if what you describe really were relatively simple, which I strongly doubt, there’s still no guarantee that the result would help applications get anywhere near the levels of reliability they can achieve using Erlang.

Actually, yes, it would, because Scala's already done it. Actors is a library, not part of the language, and as such, is extensible in ways we haven't anticipated yet. As for creating and tearing down JVMs automatically, again, JR has done that already. Combining the two is probably not much more than talking to Prof. Olsson and Prof. Odersky for a while, then writing the code for the host; if I get some time, I'll take a stab at it, if nobody's done it before now. More importantly, the lift web framework is seeing some pretty impressive scalability and performance numbers using Actors, thanks to the inherent nature of an Actors model and the intrinsic perf and scale capabilities of the JVM, though I don't know how much anybody's measured its reliability or robustness yet. (How should we measure it, come to think of it?)

Best part is, the IT department doesn't have to do anything different to their existing Java-based network topology to start taking advantage of this. Can you say the same for Erlang?

Continuing...

As to Steve’s comment that the Erlang interpreter isn’t monitorable, I never said that–I said that Erlang was not monitorable using current IT operations monitoring tools. The JVM and CLR both have gone to great lengths to build infrastructure hooks that make it easy to keep an eye not only on what’s going on at the process level (”Is it up? Is it down?”) but also what’s going on inside the system (”How many requests have we processed in the last hour? How many of those were successful? How many database connections have been created?” and so on). Nothing says that Erlang–or any other system–can’t do that, but it requires the Erlang developer build that infrastructure him-or-herself, which usually means it’s either not going to get done, making life harder for the IT support staff, or else it gets done to a minimalist level, making life harder for the IT support staff.

I know what you meant in your original posting, Ted, and my objection still stands. Are you saying here that all Java and .NET applications are by default network-monitoring-friendly, whereas Erlang applications are not? I seem to recall quite a bit of effort spent by various teams at my previous employer to make sure our distributed computing products, including the Java-based products and .NET-based products, played reasonably well with network monitoring systems, and I sure don’t recall any of it being automatic. Yes, it’s nice that the Java and CLR guys have made their infrastructure monitorable, but that doesn’t relieve developers of the need to put actual effort into tying their applications into the monitoring system in a way that provides useful information that makes sense. There is no magic here, and in my experience, even with all this support, it still doesn’t guarantee that monitoring support will be done to the degree that the IT support staff would like to see.

And do you honestly believe Erlang — conceived, designed, implemented, and maintained by a large well-established telecommunications company for use in highly-reliable telecommunications systems — would offer nothing in the way of tying into network monitoring systems? I guess SNMP, for example, doesn’t count anymore?

(Coincidentally, I recently had to tie some of the Erlang stuff I’m currently working on into a monitoring system which isn’t written in Erlang, and it took me maybe a quarter of a workday to integrate them. I’m absolutely certain it would have taken longer in Java.)

Every JVM and CLR process are, by default, network-monitoring-friendly. Java5 introduced JMX, and the CLR has had PerfMon and WMI hooks in it since Day One. Can't make that any clearer. Dunno what kind of efforts your previous employer was going through, but perhaps those efforts were back in the Java 1.4 and earlier days, when JMX wasn't a part of the platform. Frankly, whether the application you're monitoring hooks into the monitoring infrastructure is not really part of the argument, since Erlang doesn't offer that, either. I'm more concerned with whether the infrastructure is monitoring-friendly.

Considering that most IT departments are happy if you give them any monitoring capabilities, having the infrastructure monitoring-friendly is a big deal.

And Steve, if it takes you more than a quarter of a workday to create an MBean-friendly interface, write an implementation of that interface and register the object under an ObjectName with the MBeanServer, then you're woefully out of practice in Java--you should be able to do that in an hour or so.

More to the point, though, if Erlang ties into SNMP out of the box with no work required by the programmer, please tell me where that's doc'ed and how it works! I won't claim to be the smartest Erlang programmer on the block, so anywhere you can point to facts about Erlang that I'm missing, please point 'em out!

Finally, Steve approaches the coup de grace:

But here’s the part of Ted’s response that I really don’t understand:

So given that an execution engine could easily adopt the model that gives Erlang its reliability, and that using Erlang means a lot more work to get the monitorability and manageability (which is a necessary side-effect requirement of accepting that failure happens), hopefully my reasons for saying that Erlang (or Ruby’s or any other native-implemented language) is a non-starter for me becomes more clear.

Ted, first you state that an execution engine could (emphasis mine) “easily adopt the model that gives Erlang its reliability,” and then you say that it’s “a lot more work” for anyone to write an Erlang application that can be monitored and managed? Aren’t you getting those backwards? It should be obvious that in reality, writing a monitorable Erlang app is not hard at all, whereas building Erlang-level reliability into another VM would be a considerably complicated and time-consuming undertaking.

Yes, the JVM could easily adopt the multi-process model if it chose to. (Said work is being done via the Java Isolates JSR.) The CLR already does (via AppDomains). I mean what I say when I say it. If you have facts that disagree, please cite them. You've already stated that Erlang hooks into SNMP, so please, if you want to get the same degree of monitoring and management that the JVM and CLR have, write the full set of monitoring hooks to keep track of all the same things the JVM and CLR track inside their respective VMs and expose them via SNMP. If you're looking for the full set, look either in the javax.management package JavaDoc and take every interface that ends in "MBean", or walk up to any Windows machine with the .NET framework installed and look at the set of PerfMon counters exposed there.

If you really want to prove your point, let's have a bake-off: on the sound of the gun firing, you start adding the monitoring and management hooks to the Erlang interpreter, and I'll add the spin-a-process-off hooks to the CLR or the JVM, and we'll see who's done first. Then we'll release the whole thing to the world and both camps will have been made better for the experience.

Or maybe you could just port Erlang to the JVM or CLR, and then we'll both be happy.

"OMG, my BFF is so l33t."

"ROFLOL."

There's a generation that looks at the above and rolls their eyes at this, but as it turns out, this is hardly new; in fact, according to Rick Beyer, author of The Greatest Presidential Stories Never Told, we get the phrase "OK" from exactly the same process:

People all over the world know what "O.K." means. But few of them realize it was born fro a wordplay craze and a presidential election.

In all started in Boston in 1838. People there started using humorous initials, sometimes combined with purposeful misspellings, just for fun.

Gosh, this sounds familiar.

Newspapers picked up the fad, and writers had a high old time throwing around all sorts of acronyms.

For example:

g.t.d.h.d = "give the devil his due"

n.g. = "no go"

s. p. = "small potatoes"

O. W. = "Oll Wright (all right)"

G. T. = "Gone to Texas"

And there was another expression that started gaining some currency: "Oll Korrect", or O.K.

So that's what it's supposed to mean.

The fad spread quickly to New York, but the phrase "O.K." didn't come into national use until the presidential campaign of 1840. Democrats trying to reelect Martin Van Buren were casting around for political slogans. Van Buren was from Kinderhook, New York, and was sometimes called "Old Kinderhook". O.K. Political operatives seized on the coincidence. Democrats started forming O.K. clubs and staging O.K. balls. The campaign catapulted the expression into national circulation.

Van Buren lost his bid for reelection. But "O.K." won in a landslide, and is used billions of times a day in all corners of the globe.

l33t.

(BTW, there's 99 more of those, and they're all equally fascinating.)

Recently, a former student asked me,

I was in a .NET web services training class that you gave probably 4 or so years ago on-site at a [company name] office in [city], north of Atlanta.  At that time I asked you for a list of the technical blogs that you read, and I am curious which blogs you are reading now.  I am now with a small company where I have to be a jack of all trades, in the last year I have worked in C++ and Perl backend type projects and web frontend projects with Java, C#, and RoR, so I find your perspective interesting since you also work with various technologies and aren't a zealot for a specific one.

Any way, please either respond by email or in your blog, because I think that others may be interested in the list also.

As one might expect, my blog list is a bit eclectic, but I suppose that's part of the charm of somebody looking to study Java, .NET, C++, Smalltalk, Ruby, Parrot, LLVM, and other languages and environments. So, without further ado, I've pasted in the contents of my OPML file for cut&paste and easy import.

Having said that, though, I would strongly suggest not just blindly importing the whole set of feeds into your nearest RSS reader, but take a moment and go visit each one before you add it. It takes longer, granted, but the time spent is a worthy investment--you don't want to have to declare "blog bankruptcy".

Editor's note: We pause here as readers look at each other and go... "WTF?!?"

"Blog bankruptcy" is a condition similar to "email bankruptcy", when otherwise perfectly high-functioning people give up on trying to catch up to the flood of messages in their email client's Inbox and delete the whole mess (usually with some kind of public apology explaining why and asking those who've emailed them in the past to resend something if it was really important), effectively trying to "start over" with their email in much the same way that Chapter Seven or Chapter Eleven allows companies to "start over" with their creditors, or declaring bankruptcy allows private citizens to do the same with theirs. "Blog bankruptcy" is a similar kind of condition: your RSS reader becomes so full of stuff that you can't keep up, and you can't even remember which blogs were the interesting ones, so you nuke the whole thing and get away from the blog-reading thing for a while.

This happened to me, in fact: a few years ago, when I became the editor-in-chief of TheServerSide.NET, I asked a few folks for their OPML lists, so that I could quickly and easily build a list of blogs that would "tune me in" to the software industry around me, and many of them quite agreeably complied. I took my RSS reader (Newsgator, at the time) and dutifully imported all of them, and ended up with a collection of blogs that was easily into the hundreds of feeds long. And, over time, I found myself reading fewer and fewer blogs, mostly because the whole set was so... intimidating. I mean, I would pick at the list of blogs and their entries in the same way that I picked at vegetables on my plate as a child--half-heartedly, with no real enthusiasm, as if this was something my parents were forcing me to do. That just ruined the experience of blog-reading for me, and eventually (after I left TSS.NET for other pastures), I nuked the whole thing--even going so far as to uninstall my copy of Newsgator--and gave up.

Naturally, I missed it, and slowly over time began to rebuild the list, this time, taking each feed one at a time, carefully weighing what value the feed was to me and selecting only those that I thought had a high signal-to-noise ratio. (This is partly why I don't include much "personal" info in this blog--I found myself routinely stripping away those blogs that had more personal content and less technical content, and I figured if I didn't want to read it, others probably felt the same way.) Over the last year or two, I've rebuilt the list to the point where I probably need to prune a bit and close a few of them back down, but for now, I'm happy with the list I've got.

And speaking of which....

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Happy reading.....

Not too long ago, Don wrote:

The three most “personal” choices a developer makes are language, tool, and OS.

No.

That may be true for somebody who works for a large commercial or open source vendor, whose team is building something that fits into one of those three categories and wants to see that language/tool/OS succeed.

That is not where most of us live. If you do, certainly, you are welcome to your opinion, but please accept with good grace that your agenda is not the same as my own.

Most of us in the practitioner space are using languages, tools and OSes to solve customer problems, and making the decision to use a particular language, tool or OS a personal one generally gets us into trouble--how many developers do you know that identify themselves so closely with that decision that they include it in their personal metadata?

"Hi, I'm Joe, and I'm a Java programmer."

Or, "Oh, good God, you're running Windows? What are you, some kind of Micro$oft lover or something?"

Or, "Linux? You really are a geek, aren't you? Recompiled your kernel lately (snicker, snicker)?"

Sorry, but all of those make me want to hurl. Of these kinds of statements are technical zealotry and flame wars built. When programmers embed their choice so deeply into their psyche that it becomes the tagline by which they identify themselves, it becomes an "ego" thing instead of a "tool" thing.

What's more, it involves customers and people outside the field in an argument that has nothing to do with them. Think about it for a second; the last time you hired a contractor to add a deck to your house, what's your reaction when they introduce themselves as,

"Hi, I'm Kim, and I'm a Craftsman contractor."

Or, overheard at the job site, "Oh, good God, you're using a Skil? What are you, some kind of nut or something?"

Or, as you look at the tools on their belt, "Nokita? You really are a geek, aren't you? Rebuilt your tools from scratch lately (snicker, snicker)?"

Do you, the customer, really care what kind of tools they use? Or do you care more for the quality of solution they build for you?

It's hard to imagine how the discussion can even come up, it's so ludicrous.

Try this one on, instead:

"Hi, I'm Ted, and I'm a programmer."

I use a variety of languages, tools, and OSes, and my choice of which to use are all geared around a single end goal: not to promote my own social or political agenda, but to make my customer happy.

Sometimes that means using C# on Windows. Sometimes that means using Java on Linux. Sometimes that means Ruby on Mac OS X. Sometimes that means creating a DSL. Sometimes that means using EJB, or Spring, or F#, or Scala, or FXCop, or FindBugs, or log4j, or ... ad infinitum.

Don't get me wrong, I have my opinions, just as contractors (and truck drivers, it turns out) do. And, like most professionals in their field, I'm happy to share those opinions with others in my field, and also with my customers when they ask: I think C# provides a good answer in certain contexts, and that Java provides an equally good answer, but in different contexts. I will be happy to explain my recommendation on which languages, tools and OSes to use, because unlike the contractor, the languages, tools, and OSes I use will be visible to the customer when the software goes into Production, at a variety of levels, and thus, the customer should be involved in that decision. (Sometimes the situation is really one where the customer won't see it, in which case the developer can have full confidence in whatever language/tool/OS they choose... but that's far more often the exception than the rule, and will generally only be true in cases where the developer is providing a complete customer "hands-off" hosting solution.)

I choose to be pro-choice.

A couple of folks have taken me to task over some of the things I said... or didn't say... in my last blog piece. So, in no particular order, let's discuss.

A few commented on how I left out commentary on language X, Y or Z. That wasn't an accidental slip or surge of forgetfulness, but I didn't want to rattle off a laundry list of every language I've run across or am exploring, since that list would be much, much longer and arguably of little to no additional benefit. Having said that, though, a more comprehensive list (and more comprehensive explanation and thought process) is probably deserved, so expect to see that from me before long, maybe in the next week or two.

Steve Vinoski wrote:

In a recent post, Ted Neward gives a brief description of a variety of programming languages. It’s a useful post; I’ve known Ted for awhile now, and he’s quite knowledgeable about such things. Still, I have to comment on what he says about Erlang....  I might have said it like this:

Erlang. Joe Armstrong’s baby was built to solve a specific set of problems at Ericsson, and from it we can learn a phenomenal amount about building highly reliable systems that can also support massive concurrency. The fact that it runs on its own interpreter, good; otherwise, the reliability wouldn’t be there and it would be just another curious but useless concurrency-oriented language experiment.

Far too many blog posts and articles that touch on Erlang completely miss the point that reliability is an extremely important aspect of the language.

To achieve reliability, you have to accept the fact that failure will occur, Once you accept that, then other things fall into place: you need to be able to restart things quickly, and to do that, processes need to be cheap. If something fails, you don’t want it taking everything else with it, so you need to at least minimize, if not eliminate, sharing, which leads you to message passing. You also need monitoring capabilities that can detect failed processes and restart them (BTW in the same posting Ted seems to claim that Erlang has no monitoring capabilities, which baffles me).

Massive concurrency capabilities become far easier with an architecture that provides lightweight processes that share nothing, but that doesn’t mean that once you design it, the rest is just a simple matter of programming. Rather, actually implementing all this in a way that delivers what’s needed and performs more than adequately for production-quality systems is an incredibly enormous challenge, one that the Erlang development team has quite admirably met, and that’s an understatement if there ever was one.

They come for the concurrency but they stay for the reliability. Do any other “Erlang-like” languages have real, live, production systems in the field that have been running non-stop for years? (That’s not a rhetorical question; if you know of any such languages, please let me know.) Next time you see yet another posting about Erlang and concurrency, especially those of the form “Erlang-like concurrency in language X!” just ask the author: where’s the reliability?

As he says, Steve and I have known each other for a while now, so I'm fairly comfortable in saying, Mr. Vinoski, you conflate two ideas together in your assessment of Erlang, and teasing those two things apart reveals a great deal about Erlang, reliability, and the greater world at large.

Erlang's reliability model--that is, the spawn-a-thousand-processes model--is not unique to Erlang. In fact, it's been the model for Unix programs and servers, most notably the Apache web server, for decades. When building a robust system under Unix, a master-slave model, in which a master process spawns (and monitors) n number of child processes to do the actual work, offers that same kind of reliability and robustness. If one of these processes fail (due to corrupted memory access, operating system fault, or what-have-you), the process can simply die and be replaced by a new child process. Under the Windows model, which stresses threads rather than processes, corrupted memory access tearing down the process brings down the entire system; this is partly why .NET chose to create the AppDomain model, which looks and feels remarkably like the lightweight process model. (It still can't stop a random rogue pointer access from tearing down the entire process, but if we assume that future servers will be written all in managed code, it offers the same kind of reliability that the process model does so long as your kernel drivers don't crash.)

There is no reason a VM (JVM, CLR, Parrot, etc) could not do this. In fact, here's the kicker: it would be easier for a VM environment to do this, because VM's, by their nature, seek to abstract away the details of the underlying platform that muddy up the picture. It would be relatively simple to take an Actors-based Java application, such as that currently being built in Scala, and move it away from a threads-based model and over to a process-based model (with the JVM constuction/teardown being handled entirely by underlying infrastructure) with little to no impact on the programming model.

As to Steve's comment that the Erlang interpreter isn't monitorable, I never said that--I said that Erlang was not monitorable using current IT operations monitoring tools. The JVM and CLR both have gone to great lengths to build infrastructure hooks that make it easy to keep an eye not only on what's going on at the process level ("Is it up? Is it down?") but also what's going on inside the system ("How many requests have we processed in the last hour? How many of those were successful? How many database connections have been created?" and so on). Nothing says that Erlang--or any other system--can't do that, but it requires the Erlang developer build that infrastructure him-or-herself, which usually means it's either not going to get done, making life harder for the IT support staff, or else it gets done to a minimalist level, making life harder for the IT support staff.

So given that an execution engine could easily adopt the model that gives Erlang its reliability, and that using Erlang means a lot more work to get the monitorability and manageability (which is a necessary side-effect requirement of accepting that failure happens), hopefully my reasons for saying that Erlang (or Ruby's or any other native-implemented language) is a non-starter for me becomes more clear.

Meanwhile, Patrick Logan offers up some sharp words about my preference for VMs:

What is this obsession with some virtual machine being the one, true byte code? The Java Virtual Machine, the CLR, Parrot, whatever. Give it up.

I agree with Steve Vinoski...

The fact that it runs on its own interpreter, good; otherwise, the reliability wouldn’t be there.

We need to get over our thinking about "One VM to bring them all and in the darkness bind them". Instead we should be focused on improving interprocess communication among various languages. This can be done with HTTP and XMPP. And we should expecially be focused on reliability, deployment, starting and stopping locally or remotely, etc. XMPP's "presence" provides Erlang-process-like linking of a sort as well.

With Erlang's JInterface for Java then a Java process can look like an Erlang process (distributed or remote). Two or more Java processes can use JInterface to communicate and "link" reliably and Erlang virtual machines and libraries, save this one single .jar, do not have to be anywhere in sight.

To obsess about a single VM is to remain stuck at about 1980 and UCSD Pascal's p-code. It just should not matter today, and certainly not tomorrow. The forest is now much more important than any given tree.

Pay attention to the new JVM from IBM in support of their lightweight, fast-start, single-purpose process philosophy embodied in Project Zero. It's not intended to be a big honkin' run everything forever virtual machine. It will support JVM languages and the more the merrier in the sense that such a JVM will enable lightweight pieces to be stiched together dynamically. However the intention is to perform some interprocess communication and then get out of the way. Exactly the right approach for any virtual machine.

Jini clearly is *the* most important thing about Java, ever. But it's lost. Gone. Buh-bye. Pity.

"We need to get over our thinking about "One VM to bring them all and in the darkness bind them". " Huh? How did we go from "I like virtual machine/execution environments because of the support they give my code for free" to "One VM to bring them all and in the darkness bind them"? I truly fail to see the logical connection there. My love for both the JVM and the CLR has hopefully made itself clear, but maybe Patrick's only subscribed to the Java/J2EE category bits of my RSS feed. Fact is, I'm coming to like any virtual machine/execution environment that offers a layer of abstraction over the details of the underlying platform itself, because developers do not want to deal with those details. They want to be able to get at them when it becomes necessary, granted, but the actual details should remain hidden (as best they can, anyway) until that time.

"Instead we should be focused on improving interprocess communication among various languages. This can be done with HTTP and XMPP."  I'm sorry, but I'm getting very very tired of this "HTTP is the best way to communicate" meme that surrounds the Internet. Yes, HTTP was successful. Nobody is arguing with this. So is FTP. So is SMTP and POP3. So, for that matter, is XMPP. Each serves a useful purpose, solving a particular problem. Let's not try to force everything down a single pipe, shall we? I would hate to be so focused on the tree of HTTP that we lose sight of the forest of communication protocols.

"And we should expecially [sic] be focused on reliability, deployment, starting and stopping locally or remotely, etc. XMPP's "presence" provides Erlang-process-like linking of a sort as well." Yes! XMPP's "presence" aspect is a powerful one, and heavily underutilized. "Presence", however, is really just a specific form of "discovery", and quite frankly our enterprise systems need to explore more "discovery"-based approaches, particularly for resource acquisition and monitoring. I've talked about this for years.

"To obsess about a single VM is to remain stuck at about 1980 and UCSD Pascal's p-code." Great one-liner... with no supporting logic, granted, but I'm sure it drew a cheer from the faithful.

"It just should not matter today, and certainly not tomorrow." For what reason? Based on what concepts? Look, as much as we want to try and abstract ourselves away from everything, at some point rubber must meet road, and the semantic details of the platform you're using--virtual or otherwise--make a huge difference about how you build systems. For example, Erlang's many-child-processes model works well on Unix, but not as well on Windows, owing to the heavier startup costs of creating a process under Windows. For applications that will involve spinning up thousands of processes, Windows is probably not a good platform to use.

Disclaimer: This "it's heavier to spin up processes on Windows than Unix" belief is one I've not verified personally; I'm trusting what I've heard from other sources I know and trust. Under later Windows releases, this may have changed, but my understanding is that it is still much much faster to spin up a thread on Windows than a separate process, and that it is only marginally faster to spin up a thread on Unix than a process, because many Unixes use the process model to "fake" threads, the so-called LightWeightProcess model.

"The forest is now much more important than any given tree." Yes! And that means you have to keep an eye on the forest as a whole, which underscores the need for monitoring and managing capabilities in your programs. Do you want to build this by hand?

"Pay attention to the new JVM from IBM in support of their lightweight, fast-start, single-purpose process philosophy embodied in Project Zero. It's not intended to be a big honkin' run everything forever virtual machine. It will support JVM languages and the more the merrier in the sense that such a JVM will enable lightweight pieces to be stiched together dynamically. However the intention is to perform some interprocess communication and then get out of the way. Exactly the right approach for any virtual machine." Yes! You make my point for me--the point of the virtual machine/execution environment is to reduce the noise a developer must face, and if IBM's new VM gains us additional reliability by silently moving work and data between processes, great! But the only way you take advantage of this is by writing to the JVM. (Or CLR, or Parrot, or whatever.) If you don't, and instead choose to write to something that doesn't abstract away from the OS, you have to write all of this supporting infrastructure code yourself. That sounds like fun, right? Not to mention highly business-ROI-focused?

"Jini clearly is *the* most important thing about Java, ever. But it's lost. Gone. Buh-bye. Pity." Jini was cool. I liked Jini. Jini got nowhere because Sun all but abandoned it in its zeal to push the client-server EJB model of life. sigh I wish they had sought to incorporate more of the discovery elements of Jini into the J2EE stack (see the previous paragraph). But they didn't, and as a result, Jini is all but dead.

Disclaimer: I know, I know, Jini isn't really dead. The bits are still there, you can still download them and run them, and there is a rabidly zealous community of supporters out there, but as a tool in widespread use and a good bet for an IT department, it's a non-starter. Oh, and if you're one of those rabidly zealous supporters, don't bother emailing me to tell me how wrong I am, I won't respond. Don't forget that FoxPro and OS/2 still have a rabidly zealous community of supporters out there, too.

Frankly, a comment on Patrick's blog entry really captures my point precisely, so (hopefully with permission) I will repeat it here:

The only argument you made that I can find against sharing VMs is that people should be focusing on other things. But the main reason for sharing VMs is to allow people to focus on other things, instead of focusing on creating yet another VM.

You write as if you think creating an entirely new VM from scratch would be easier than targeting a common VM. Is that really what you think?

Couldn't have said it better... though that never stops me from trying.

This just recently crossed my Inbox, this time from Redmond Developer News, and once again I'm simply amazed at the audacity of the message and rather far-fetched conclusion:

FEEDBACK: THE MOVE FROM J2EE

On Tuesday, I wrote about BMC's new Application Problem Resolution System 7.0 tooling, which provides "black box" monitoring and analysis of application behavior to help improve troubleshooting.

http://reddevnews.com/blogs/weblog.aspx?blog=2146

In talking to BMC Director Ran Gishri, I ran across some interesting perspectives that he was able to offer on the enterprise development space. Among them, the fact that large orgs seem to be moving away from J2EE and toward a mix of .NET and sundry lightweight frameworks.

Richard Eaton, an RDN reader who's a manager of database systems for Georgia System Operations Corp., confirms Gishri's insights. He wrote:

"In 2003, we made a decision to build our Web application using Java and a third-party RAD tool for Java development that was locally supported at that time. Since then, the company that developed and supported that RAD tool has gone out of business and left us with virtually no support for the product. The application development that was done was very integrated into the tool, which meant we would virtually have to rewrite the entire app. So we analyzed our experience with using Apache, Linux, Java and Eclipse for our platform and realized the effort was very management-intensive for our small team, and so we looked to .NET.

"Considering the advances in the .NET framework and CLR libraries and the integration it offered to our other third-party tools, as well as our prolific Excel spreadsheet environment, the decision was easy to go to .NET. We are also moving away from Sybase databases to SQL Server and looking into the use of SharePoint for various internal collaboration and project functions. The one-stop shop of Microsoft technology and support and ease of development and integration, I think, is the overwhelming weight in deciding between J2EE and .NET."

First of all, I'm a little shocked that based on a conversation with one individual, we can safely infer that "large orgs" are "moving away from J2EE and toward a mix of .NET and sundry lightweight frameworks". This is fair and unbiased reporting? That's like going to Houston (home of our current sitting President), or Arizona (home of the Republican candidate), and discovering that a majority of the voters there will vote Republican in the next Presidential election. Amazing! Investigative journalism at its finest.

Of course, no report like this could be taken seriously without some kind of personal anecdotal evidence as backup, so next we have a heart-rendering tear-jerker of a story in which a poor company was taken for a ride by those big bad J2EE vendors.... "We made a decision to build our Web applciation using java and a third-party RAD tool for Java... Since then, the company that [built] that RAD tool has gone out of business and left us [screwed]." Uh... wait a minute. Is this a story about moving away from J2EE, or about moving away from third-party proprietary tools that build code that's "very integrated into the tool"?

Look, this story doesn't read any better... or any more inaccurately... if we simply reverse the locations of "J2EE" and ".NET" in it. The problem here is that the company in question made a questionable decision: to base their application development on a third-party tool that couldn't be easily supported or replaced in the event the vendor went south. So when the vendor did tank, they found themselves in a thorny situation. That's not J2EE's fault. That's the company's fault.

This vetting of the third-party tool (or framework, or library, or ...) is a necessary precaution regardless of whether you're talking about the J2EE, .NET or native platforms, and whether that vendor is a commercial vendor or an open-source vendor. Some will take umbrage at the idea of treating an open-source project as a vendor, but ask yourself the hard question that few open-source advocates really talk much about: in the event the project committers abandon the project, are you really prepared to take up support for it yourself? At Java shows, I frequently ask how many people in the audience have used Tomcat, and almost 100% of the room raises their hand. I ask how many have actually looked at the Tomcat source code, and that number goes down dramatically. Swap in any project you care to name: Hibernate, Ant, Spring, you name it, lots of Java devs have used them, but few are prepared to support them. Open source projects have to be seen in the same light as vendors: some will disappear, some won't, and it's hard to tell which ones are which at the time you're looking to adopt them, so you're best off assuming the worst and figuring out your strategy.

It's called risk management assessment, and I wish more software development projects did it.

Does .NET offer integration to "other third-party tools"? Sure, depending on the tools, which can even include Java/J2EE, if you manage it right. (I should know.) Am I trying to advocate using J2EE over .NET or vice versa? Hell no--every company has to make the decision for itself, and every company's context is different. Some will even find that neither stack works well for them, and choose to go with something else, a la C++ or Ruby or Perl or... or whatever.

Just make sure you know what you are banking on, and how central (or not) those pieces are to your strategy.

So I see, via the blogosphere, that a Java 6 update is available for the Mac, so I run off to the Apple website to download the package. Click on the link, and I'm happy. Wait....

It's for 64-bit Intel Macs only?!?

Apple, why do you tease me this way? Why is it that you can build it for 64-bit machines, but not 32-bit? This just seems entirely spurious and artificial. Somebody please tell me that it's otherwise, and why, because until then, I'm going to just assume that Apple doesn't give a whit about Java.

Recently, it has become the fad to weigh in on the Groovy vs JRuby debate, usually along the lines of "Which is X?", where X is one of "better", "faster", "more powerful", "more acceptable", "easier", and so on. (Everybody seems to have their own adjective/adverb to slide in there, so I won't even begin to try to list them all.)

Rick Hightower, in a blog post from January, weighs in on this and comes down harshly on both Scala and JRuby. Frankly, I found the whole post to ooze bitterness and maybe a touch of jealousy. Some of the highlights:

• "In short: Scala seems like the next over-hyped language." Rick, they're all over-hyped, including your own nominee for the Presidential race, Groovy. I mean, if we're going to weigh this on the grounds of syntax or familiarity, let's throw {ECMA/Java}script into the ring, since it's:
  1. ... been around a lot longer than Groovy and therefore a lot more familiar and comfortable to the programmers that might use either or both,
  2. ... always going to be around, thanks to its inclusion in HTML browsers, and therefore a good investment in your knowledge portfolio regardless of where you end up using it, client- or server- or wherever-side,
  3. ... has many, if not all, of the same features that Groovy (or JRuby) supports,
  4. ... runs on top of the JVM (several ways, including Rhino, which ships with JDK 6 now, and FESI),
  5. ... and has Steve Yegge's vote of confidence, so you know is has to be good, right?
• "Sun please drop JRuby support. It is a waste of time. Take that money and spend it on Groovy which has a compatible syntax to Java. ... Does Ruby and Rails have good ideas? Yes. Borrow them and move on." This seems like a questionable decision to me--why cherry-pick features from one language and port them over to a different language, for no other reason than to say you did? Why not just use said original language in the first place, assuming it can run on your particular platform? Down this path lies the madness that C# and VB have become, as the C# and VB teams seek to create "feature parity" between the two languages, just so that you as a developer can either have your curly-braces-and-semicolons or not. Stupid. Talk about a waste of time and energy. Ruby's syntax is (mostly) vetted, the test cases written, and the featureset understood. Do something different if you're going to create a new language, don't just take the existing features of a language and put new tokens around it. In the South, that's called putting lipstick on the pig: it may be prettier than it was, but underneath, it's still just a pig. (Note: sometimes the new language is designed specifically to be a subset of the feature set of the source language, and I'm completely supportive of that--sometimes it's necessary to scale back just as much as it is to innovate.)
• "After reading the Scala docs, my thought is: while the language features sound great, the syntax makes me want to hurl. Why do things differently just for the sake of it?" Strangely enough, they didn't. (This is frequently the complaint of those who don't understand something. "The designers couldn't have had a good reason for doing it that way, so it must have been just because they wanted to do it differently".) Scala's syntax is actually quite consistent in many ways, particularly if you came from the functional language world, and the underlying rationale is pretty easy to grok... if you bother spending enough time to find out. Scala drops static, for example, because it turns out that Java developers spend a fair amount of time trying to resolve the "should this be a static method or should it be an instance method on a Singleton object" way too often, for example. See Gilad Bracha's arguments against static if you want to find out more of the rationale here. The "def" syntax for method definition is strikingly similar to Groovy, for the same reason: it makes it clear where a definition is taking place. The name-colon-type syntax is deliberate because then it's much easier to leave off the type signatures and let the compiler do the type inferencing for you (a feature, notably, that Rick says he likes). For what it's worth, Rick, here's a lesson I continue to learn the hard way: Spend some time learning the why of something before you take aim and let fly.
• "Final words: I declare the "Ruby will rule the world" fallacy officially over. Remember: Quit pimple pimping Ruby on JRoller! Scala devotees (both of you). Don't even start!" Well, frankly, the "Ruby will rule the world" meme was that over-hyped thing you mentioned earlier, and before anybody starts the next one, let me nip it in the bud: nothing will take over the world. Nothing has taken over the world: not C++, not C, not Java, not C#, not Visual Basic, nothing. The best a language can hope for is to cross what Simon Peyton-Jones calls the "Threshold of Immortality", and lots of languages have done that, too many to list all of them here, though you could probably do so yourself. Some of those include Java, C++, C#, C, Pascal, FORTRAN, COBOL, Perl, Python, Ruby, SQL, maybe even Smalltalk and Lisp and Scheme and the others we normally don't think about.

And we haven't even bothered to go into some kind of feature shootout or performance shootout between any of these guys.

Don't get me wrong--like me, Rick is entirely entitled to his own opinions and he doesn't owe me (or anybody else) a lick of rationale to defend them. But when he comes out and suggests that Sun should drop JRuby entirely in favor of Groovy instead, I feel compelled to point out that there's some logic missing from the reasoning behind that suggestion. Cynics of this blog will suggest that I'm speaking out of both sides of my mouth: that I get to say Perl sucks, and get away with it because it's just one man's opinion but Rick can't say JRuby sucks in turn. Fact is, I'm not suggesting that Larry Wall and chromatic and the others should drop Perl and go work on something more meaningful--quite the opposite, in fact: so long as there are people who continue to use Perl, they have a responsibility to continue to develop and update that language. And Parrot is quite the interesting VM to explore in its own right. But don't expect me any time soon to be writing a bunch of Perl code except under strongly-worded protest to the United Nations.

At the end of the day, the way I think about these languages loosely falls like this:

• C++. For me, programing started here, so I will always have a special place in my heart for it. Templates were vastly more powerful than most people realized until the STL was released, and even to this day, C++ is usually blamed for the complexities of memory management even when garbage collector libraries (like the Boehm collector) were available and could have reduced that complexity significantly. The Boost libraries just blow my mind, and there's some new stuff coming in C++0X that brings C++ to a degree of parity with Java and C#. I wish I could get back to this for a project in the same way that guys fantasize about running into an old high school girlfriend on a business trip.
• C++/CLI. C++ adapted for the CLR. Interesting idea, but it's hard to see why I'd use this, given its syntactical and semantical similarities to C#. Frankly, C++/CLI seems destined to be forever the "glue" language to write managed wrappers on top of unmanaged C/C++ libraries, and that's hardly a compelling reason to pick this guy up for anything beyond that niche area.
• Java. The language I want to feature-freeze, though I do see a value in adding closures, if only to permit closures to enter the design and implementation of the Java libraries, thus making them widely available across all JVM languages. However, if I really got my way, we'd drop the closures-in-Java debate entirely and throw our weight behind John Rose's proposal for method handles in the JVM, since that would enable the same kind of facilities for libraries and without having to rev the Java language significantly. (Lesson to the Java community from the CLR community: not all features of the virtual machine have to be exposed in one language. Not even C# or VB do this.) The JVM I want to continue to enhance and revise and improve.
• Scala. Functional-object hybrid language for the JVM. Pure goodness. Hey, I'm bullish here, I admit it. Scala's type inference makes for lower ceremony, the static type system provides a degree of confidence in code that dynamic languages don't have without programmer-authored unit tests, and the functional nature offers a new design dimension that we haven't been able to easily express before. I won't say that I'm "thinking in Scala", but I'm thinking a lot about Scala these days, and F# too.
• Groovy. "Ruby meets Java in a bar and has a love child." Groovy's syntax is easy and based on Java, and that's both a good and a bad thing. Good if you're a Java programmer who doesn't want to have to reach very far to get some dynamic goodness; bad if you're trying to avoid some of the stranger or syntactically inconsistent aspects of the Java language, or looking to do some entirely new ways of doing things. Personally, I don't find Groovy all that intellectually stimulating, which is both a blessing and a curse.
• JRuby, IronRuby. Ruby on the JVM. 'nuff said. Ditto for IronRuby on to CLR. All the linguistic power (and flaws) of Ruby, on top of the JVM/CLR, which now means it's a far easier sell to the IT boys who run the datacenter.
• C#. The language is great, so long as it retains its original vision and scope. Memo to the C# team: Please let's not try to make C# into a scripting language. Scripting languages have a purpose, and that purpose is generally different from what general-purpose languages do. C# really doesn't need a REPL--don't fall into the trap of trying to make it into Lisp.
• Visual Basic. The language is great (!), so long as it retains its original vision and scope. Yes, I think the language is a good one--you don't really believe how much of a PITA case-sensitivity is until you start programming without it, and suddenly you realize that it's mostly a holdover from the C days. What right-thinking programmer overloads a symbolic name by case? Programmers have died for less than that. So why does case sensitivity matter? More importantly, VB has always been the dynamic language of choice for millions of programmers, it's time for those of us from the C++ community to just own up, admit that there was a place for VB after all, apologize, and let VB go back to being a powerful dynamic language on top of the CLR. Give it a REPL loop, make it the default choice for building top-of-the-stack code, and let VB guys build UIs that call into middle-tier components built by C# and F# guys. Everybody comes out a winner.
• F#. Functional-object hybrid language for the CLR. Pure goodness. The syntax again will seem quirky and strange to people unused to it, but it makes a lot of sense, and compositional construction using higher-order functions is a vastly underestimated and underused design technique. When functions are values, lots of things become possible, as people working in dynamic languages already know.
• Ruby. "Smalltalk meets Perl in a bar and has a love child." I like parts of the Ruby syntax, but there's too many Perl-isms in there for my taste. The fact that Ruby runs on top of its own interpreter (which is neither monitorable nor manageable using IT-datacenter-established tools) is a significant drawback. RoR may be great for vertical silo apps that don't need to integrate with the rest of the datacenter, but that's a pretty scary place to put yourself.
• Python. Dynamic language (goodness) with some functional concepts (goodness) on its own interpreter (badness) with a radical innovation in syntax called significant whitespace to do away with brackets to denote code blocks. Significant whitespace makes it incredibly awkward to embed Python code anywhere but in .py files, meaning Python's suitability for DSLs is reduced significantly. If I could get Python without significant whitespace, I'd be a lot happier camper.
• Jython/IronPython. Python on the JVM/CLR. 'nuff said.
• Perl. Parrot good. Perl syntax and philosophy not one I care for. Use as a shell scripting tool good. Use as a general-purpose programming language not one I recommend. Perl 6's incredibly delayed departure, very bad, unless you're one of those who wants to see Perl become extinct.
• {ECMA/Java}Script. Can we please finally just accept that ES is much more than just a browser extensibility tool? For most developers, this is their first exposure to a classless prototype-based object-oriented language, and unfortunately, most developers don't ever bother exploring it beyond "How do I make my web page do that floating image thing...?" Gah.
• Rhino/FESI/JScript.NET. {ECMA/Java}Script on the JVM/JVM/CLR. 'nuff said, though I wish the JScript guys would incorporate the E4X bits. JScript on the CLR makes for an interesting case study, and maybe (hopefully) they'll use it as another sanity-check for the DLR.
• PowerShell. Scripting language that finally brings much of the power of bash and tcsh and other shells to the Windows world and unifies a ton of different things together into one space: WMI, .NET, COM, and more. Highly necessary for IT admins who've suffered with batch files for decades. Language syntax isn't too bad, and I could even consider using it in an application/system as an extension language to give to power users so I can turn them loose to create emergent behavior without having to keep coming back to me with their feature requests.
• Lisp. With all apologies to Paul Graham, Lisp's window of opportunity (the "woo" factor, as Jay Zimmerman likes to call it) is essentially gone. We will always be looking back at it for ideas, I think, but it's very hard to imagine doing a project that's even remotely near an IT data center in it, for the same reason that Ruby or Erlang are hard to imagine here: running on top of an execution environment that doesn't have managability and monitorability baked in is a non-starter for me. Despite all that, however, programmers owe it to themselves to learn it, because until somebody points it out, you never realize you're color-blind. There's so many interesting ideas in here that you don't even realize what you're missing until you explore it.
• Scheme. See Lisp.
• Haskell. Love it or leave it, but you have to learn it. Functional languages are becoming big, and Haskell is a major influence on them.
• ML. Ditto to Haskell. If you want to see another functional/object hybrid language based on ML, check out OCaml. Note that OCaml is the direct predecessor to F# and the two are frequently (deliberately) syntax-compatible.
• Erlang. Joe Armstrong's baby was built to solve a specific set of problems at Ericsson, and from it we can learn a phenomenal amount about building massively parallel concurrent programs. The fact that it runs on its own interpreter, bad.

And there's still so many more to learn..... but that's the subject of another blog post, coming soon.

Update: Naturally, people complained about the languages that were left off the list. No slight is intended--there's a lot more that I could have included here, and I will go into each of these in more detail (I hope), but there's only so much time in the day, and shipping (or posting, in this case) is always a feature.

This email recently crossed my Inbox, and it just completely typifies everything I find wrong with the ESB:

Title: "Architect Complex Integration with ESB's"

Body:

F1000 Keys and Barriers to ESB Success
[Event]

Event:  [Name struck to protect the guilty]
Date:   [struck]
Times:  [struck]
Place:   Online No-Charge Conference

 

Gartner reports these 2 facts:

1) F1000 firms increasingly see the Enterprise Service Bus as a “core component” in their multi-million-dollar Service-Oriented infrastructure investments.

2) ESB software is by far the fastest growing application integration middleware market segment in all of IT – with growth rates exceeding 100% year-over-year!

 

At [EVENT], you will hear top ESB and business integration experts from IBM, Software AG, and Progress Software show you how F1000 customers design, build and deploy powerful and flexible ESBs—and cut risks and boost rewards.

12noon ET (9AM PT): Case Studies Roundtable (Keynote Panel)

In a fast-paced ESB Case Studies Roundtable, you’ll hear 6 F1000 Case Studies. Our ESB experts will share details on how ESBs improved business value and ROI for their F1000 customers.

[Name struck]
IBM
WW Marketing Content Lead for SOA Reuse and Connectivity

[Name struck]
Software AG
Dir. of Product Marketing for ESB, Enterprise Integration & B2B Tools

[Name struck]
Progress Software
Senior Product Marketing Manager

1:00pm ET: Presentation

Introduction to the webMethods ESB Platform

[Name struck]
Dir. of Product Marketing for ESB, Enterprise Integration & B2B Tools

2:00pm ET: Presentation

How ESBs can power your business

[Name struck]
WW Marketing Content Lead for SOA Reuse and Connectivity

3:00pm ET: Presentation

Progress Sonic and the SOA Portfolio: It’s your world it’s your SOA

[Name struck]
Sr. Director, Progress Product Marketing

[Event] is an [Media Company] production series designed to provide executives, business managers, software developers and architects with valuable "hands-on" information about improving techniques and results for design time and runtime SOA projects.

So what do I find so offensive about this email? Just about everything. Consider these little tidbits:

• Start with the title: "Architect Complex Integration with ESB's". The desire to create complexity is a misguided one; enterprise data centers already have too much complexity within them, and creating more just adds to the mess. Neil Ford hits this point perfectly when he talks about the difference between "essential complexity" and "accidental complexity" in his NFJS keynote. Essential complexity is that complexity required to solve the problem--the business workflow that comes as part of a business process, for example, or the rules that go into calculating shipping & handling for an order. "Accidental complexity", however, is all that complexity that occurs in software that has nothing to do with the problem at hand. When accidental complexity gets too large, the desire to "rewrite the whole thing from scratch" kicks in, something that might be OK for a single application, but clearly won't hold for systems already set in Production and working. Naturally, this means that we have to find ways to integrate all this stuff, and here comes the battalions of consultants and ideas, ranging from "data feeds" to "flat files" to "CORBA" to "Web Services" to "ESBs" to whatever-comes-next to create an n-squared problem as each system hooks up to other systems in a point-to-point fashion (regardless of what the technology was originally supposed to do). Unfortunately, as it turns out, we as an industry are much better at building accidental complexity than we are at building lean, mean, efficient systems, and holding complexity up as a goal of a system is not helping matters.
• Next, we have two "facts" reported by Gartner, with no citation of the report or the source of the facts to enable any kind of follow-up fact-checking. Don't get me wrong, I have no doubt that Gartner said these things, and in fact, I won't even dispute the facts themselves--ESBs were pretty unheard of a few years ago, so the fact that it's the "fastest growing application integration middleware" wouldn't even surprise me--anything to help solve this problem of complexity in their data center is welcome, and hey, it's a lot easier to purchase something than to face the problem. After all, it's only money. And the fact that "F1000 firms increasingly see the Enterprise Service Bus as a “core component” in their multi-million-dollar Service-Oriented infrastructure investments"? Sure, I buy that too: if you have a multi-million-dollar infrastructure investment, and everybody seems to be doing ESBs, then by Golly, you're going to do an ESB too, because "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", which, loosely translated, means, "If I'm a CTO, and I spend a million dollars on something that everybody else is spending a million dollars on, you can't really fire me when--not if--it doesn't work. After all, it's only money, and it's not my money, to boot, compared with losing my job if I spend that million on a serious in-depth look at our IT infrastructure and find out exactly what it would take to get some of that accidental complexity under control."
• Next, we have the fact that this event is an event "designed to provide executives, business managers, software developers and architects with valuable 'hands-on' information about improving technologies and results for design time and runtime SOA projects." How can you create an event that will be appealing and useful to that diverse of a crowd? The concerns that executives face are nowhere near the concerns that face software developers, and business managers' concerns are definitely different from those that architects face. To be useful to the executive, it must be high-level; to be useful to the software developer, it must be low-level. You cannot serve two masters well, much less four.
• Following up on said quote, let's examine the fact that this is a webcast (an online event), yet it claims to provide 'hands-on' information. Last time I checked, 'hands-on' meant I can get my hands on it myself and, presumably, drive it for myself to see how well it works. This is remarkably difficult to do in a webcast event, particularly one that's only three hours long and consists of a panel. So "hands-on" here must mean you can touch your keyboard, which, of course, is connected to the computer that's displaying the web browser in which this information is being displayed. That must be the new definition of 'hands-on' in this "Web 2.0" world. I guess.
• Oh, and did anybody else notice that all of this "information about improving techniques and results for design time and runtime SOA projects" is being presented by not one but three managers? Of Marketing? No offense to the intelligence of these three gentlemen intended, but last time I looked, Marketing guys don't spend much time implementing SOA projects of any time, design, run- or otherwise. They spend time trying to cook up good campaigns to reach developers and their managers in order to sell product. Not exactly a huge source of technical information, at least, not in my experience.
• Last but not least, does anyone find it at all suspicious that this seminar is being sponsored by three companies with a vested interest in selling you on ESB so that they can sell you on their ESB product? I dunno about y'all, but when the salesman comes around to my door, I don't take much of anything he says too literally or too naively. Why we take Marketing and Sales executives from technology companies without the same degree of cynicism has never failed to amaze me.

At the end of the day, sensationalist presentations, claims of amazing productivity, or wild-eyed testimonials without sufficient history to prove or disprove them do not only hurt the developers and companies seeking to use these tools, they hurt the credibility of the companies promoting these tools. Claiming that your product is the answer to all the IT world's ills is a recipe for disaster unless you can deliver the goods, and frankly, I have yet to see a tool--any tool--answer that promise.

A message to the ESB vendors: Don't make it harder on us... or yourselves. Give us hard technical info, not sensationalist claims.

From Wikipedia (itself a source of conceptual folk etymology, but that's another rant):

• A commonly held misunderstanding of the origin of a particular word, a false etymology
• "The popular perversion of the form of words in order to render it apparently significant"; "the process by which a word or phrase, usually one of seemingly opaque formation, is arbitrarily reshaped so as to yield a form which is considered to be more transparent"

What do I mean by "technical folk etymology"?

1. If you're a Java developer, consider the term EJB. No, I mean, seriously think about it for a moment. What images are conjured before your eyes when you do so? Horrendous APIs, hideous deployment requirements, complete untestability, and something that takes forty-five minutes to start?
2. If you're a Ruby developer, consider the phrase static typing. Same sort of reaction?
3. If you're a .NET developer, try on COM or COM+ or even ATL. Mystifying collections of code repeated by rote, cut-and-pasted from that very first project you built by hand from Inside OLE 2, and once you got it to work, served as your basic template for every other COM/MTS/COM+ entity you ever built?
4. Or, if you're any of these, how about Visual Basic?
5. Or maybe Web services, specifically all those WS-* specifications?

As the MVP Summit Product Team dinners wound down here in Redmond tonight, I found myself at a table with (not surprisingly) Neal Ford and Venkat Subramaniam, two of my close friends from the NFJS tour, and who should join us but first Amanda Silver (lately of the Office team, but with her heart still firmly rooted in her Visual Basic dev days), then Don Box (lately of the Oslo team) and Chris Sells (also lately of the Oslo team), and a rousing discussion around the concept of DSLs--domain specific languages--arose, largely because Don wanted to sound out Venkat and Neal on the subject.

Listening to the conversation (Don was mostly interested in Neal and Venkat's opinions, so I just relaxed and listened for the most part), I realized that the discussion was entirely rooted in this concept of context, that ephemeral structure surrounding a concept that gives it shape and color and taste and the other aesthetic qualities that lead us to "like" or "dislike" or "accept" or "reject" certain concepts. Don held the position--either for arguments' sake or because he believes it, I'm not sure which--that domain-specific languages lose context too easily once stored on the file system, in ways that data does not. His test was to suggest "What if a random piece of text drops into my email, how do I know what consumes this text?" The answer, of course, is that you don't, unless you somehow have a context by which to understand a piece of text, in many cases based solely on nothing more than filesystem extension, or MIME type, or the "#!/bin/..." line that precedes many shell scripts, and so on.

Interestingly enough, as I drove home after the dinner, I realized that the conversation echoed an exchange Neal and Venkat and I were having in the car on the way over, about how Microsoft (I think) is making a huge mistake by looking to make C# more dynamic in nature[1]. My position was (and is) that Microsoft needs to differentiate the two key languages they offer--C# and Visual Basic--and an obvious way to do so would be to designate VB as the official "dynamic language" for the CLR, and C# as the official "static language" for the CLR, and encourage developers to use C# to build infrastructure (libraries and business types and so on) and VB to build "top of the stack" kinds of code (WinForms, ASP.NET, and so on).

Neal put me squarely back on my heels with this (paraphrased) comment: Microsoft will never do this, because Visual Basic will never be able to shed the image it has gained, that of being the programming language for idiots[2].

Wow.

Sad thing is, he's right. Go back to the terms I suggested you think about at the top of this blog post. If you're like most Java developers, you heard the term "EJB" and immediately got a note of distaste in your mouth. You know that if you suggest EJB on your next Java project, you will be ridiculed and shamed and made to stand in the corner with the Dunce Cap on, even if it makes complete sense from a technical perspective. Companies are choosing instead to build their own transactional-oriented client/server middleware infrastructure, just to avoid the "shame" of using EJB. Because, as we all know, you just can't test EJB.

Which, by the way, is a fallacy, and always has been. Oh, I know, you meant you can't unit-test EJB, but that's a fallacy too. It's always been testable, to the same degree that any servlet application has been testable, it's just that nobody wanted to take the time to figure out how to test it effectively, particularly not once Rod Johnson had unleashed Spring upon the world and Made Everything Better(TM) (or, at least, XML configurable, which is better... right?).

Static typing suffers the same kind of negative prejudice today. Suggest that C++ has a place in the world, and you will be kicked to the curb by any Right-Thinking Technical Leader. Suggest that C++ has a place on your next project, and you're likely to get sternly reprimanded, possibly even cut loose from the project. Suggest anything that doesn't fit with the Way We Build Software Today, and you're swimming upstream, either with management or with your fellow developers.

All because they fall prey to technical folk etymology. They bend the context around the phrases in question to mean something entirely different than what the words actually mean, and as a result, the words take on an aura of snarling, bitter distaste, or, worse, angelic euphoric enlightenment.

Domain-specific languages are the new phrase of the moment, and its emotional context is being built as we speak. Functional languages will be there sometime next year or the year after. For both, the euphoria is growing, and for each, in some period of n (three, maybe four) years will be crashing just as hard as they were built up, just as Ruby's and Visual Basic's and COM's and EJB's and WS-*'s and other technologies have done before it. It's as predictable as the flow of alcohol at an MVP Summit, or the consumption of either caffeine at an all-night code frenzy.

Other industries have varying relationships with this notion of context: the medical field seems to be almost as susceptible to it as we are, particularly the area of weight management and holistic health (remember the water diet? the South Beach diet? the no-sodium diet? the low-cholesterol diet?), whereas traditional engineering disciplines, such as electrical and construction disciplines, seem far less vulnerable to "the hip new thing of the day". I'm not sure why this is, quite honestly, except that software and medicine share the similar characteristics of a rapid influx of new information on a regular, even daily, basis.

People often call me a contrarian, a technical fuddy-duddy who refuses to embrace anything new or anything "bleeding-edge". In many respects, I welcome and accept that label, but frankly, I bristle at the implicit "you just don't want to learn anything new" accusation, because it's a gross misunderstanding and hideous misinterpretation of what I'm really trying to do: Distance myself from the emotional context surrounding a technology, and examine it through the lens of dispassionate observation.

In short, I actively seek to defeat technical folk etymology, if only in the small area I personally can affect.

Do you?

[1] That particular discussion will have to wait for a different blog post on a different day.

[2] I should point out, before the hate mail comes flooding in, that this isn't Neal's own opinion, nor mine--witness my post on "Mort means productivity". What he--and I--refer to here is the reputation Visual Basic has garnered, not the fact surrounding it. And if you care to argue that point, then you're not paying attention to the relative average salary numbers between C# and Visual Basic developers. The laws of economics do not lie.

From the "Where the hell was I that day?" Department....

The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 1.1!

Homepage: http://www.jruby.org/
Download: http://dist.codehaus.org/jruby/

JRuby 1.1 is the second major release for our project.  The main goal for 1.1
has been improving performance.  We have made great strides in performance
during the last nine months.  There have been more and more reports of
applications exceeding Ruby 1.8.6 performance; we are even beating Ruby 1.9
in some microbenchmarks. ...

(Source: http://docs.codehaus.org/display/JRUBY/2008/04/05/JRuby+1.1+Released)

Congratulations to Thomas and Charlie and the rest of the JRuby team; I'm looking forward to playing around with JRuby, specifically in AOT/compiled mode, and for using it as Ruby was originally intended, as a scripting language to make working with systems (in this case, the JVM) easier, a la JMX client scripts to stop-and-start a web application during development/deployment.

(Editor's note: This post is likely to open a huge can of whoop-*ss on this blog, so unless you want to get caught up in the huge bar fight that's about to break out, you're advised to take your whiskey or beer and head outside for a smoke until the cops come.)

As a fellow Scala writer, I've been following Daniel Spiewak's blog with no small amount of interest, as he discovers little tidbits inside the Scala language (like the Option type). Then I ran across this entry, about benchmarks and comparing the performance of Java, Groovy and Scala:

I’ve seen these results dozens of times (looking back at the post), but they never cease to startle me.  How could Groovy be that much slower than everything else?  Granted it is very much a dynamic language, compared to Java and Scala which are peers in static-land.  But still, this is a ray tracer we’re talking about!  There’s no meta-programming involved to muddle the scene, so a halfway-decent optimizer should be able to at least squeeze that gradient down to maybe 5x as slow, rather than a factor of 830.

That's a huge discrepancy, and like Daniel, I'm not sure where the perf hit comes from, particularly when we consider that JRuby, another language with equally powerful metaobject protocol (MOP) capabilities, is turning in performance times that are equal to those we see with the original Ruby interpreter (according to Daniel's blog entry, though I note that the comparison of JRuby to Java isn't given). And if the disbelievers in the crowd are starting to tune this out based on the fact that "Ah, it must be an edge case, after all, there's always one benchmark that any language will fail compared to another one; maybe Groovy's just not cut out to do ray-tracing. Yeah, that must be it. Besides, how often do I really do ray-tracing when I'm writing code at work?", take heed, for Daniel notes this and starts to cite other evidence that seem to establish a disturbing pattern:

If this were an isolated incident, I would probably just blow it off as bad benchmarking, or perhaps an odd corner case that trips badness in the Groovy runtime.  Then a week later, I read this post by Pete Knego (which shows Groovy's performance as equally disappointing, on the order of 7.6x to 56x worse than equivalent Java code --TKN).

All of this is old news, so the question is: Why am I bringing this up now?  Well, I recently saw a post on Groovy Zone by none-other-than Rick Ross, talking about this very subject.  Rick’s post was in response to two posts (here and here), discussing ways to improve Groovy code performance by obfuscating code.

Uh, oh. I don't know about y'all, but anytime somebody is suggesting improving performance by obfuscating code, I'm nervous--almost by definition, code obfuscation makes code run more slowly, not more quickly, because now the bytecode is pulled out of familiar patterns recognizable by the JITter and therefore more aggressively turned into optimized native code. I'm not saying Rick is wrong, but if his experiments are leading him to understand that obfuscated code is somehow running faster than non-obfuscated code, then something deeply strange is afoot.

(Editor's note: Better hurry and head outside folks, the Groovyists in the corner are starting to grumble amongst themselves, working up the courage to toss that first beer in the piano player's face.)

Daniel's not done here, though, and goes on:

Final result?

This text is being written as I was changing and trying things, I gained 20s from
minor changes of which I lost track. " src="http://www.codecommit.com/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif"> I am currently at 1m30s (down from the
original 4m and comparing with Java’s 4s).

I’m sorry, this is acceptable performance?  This is someone who’s spent time trying to optimize Groovy, and by his own admission, Groovy is 23x slower than the equivalent Java code.  Certainly this is a far cry from the 830x slower in the ray tracer benchmark, but in this case it’s simple string manipulation, rather than a mathematically intensive test.

Coming back to Rick’s entry, he looks at the conclusion and has this to say about it:

Language performance is highly overrated

Much is often made of the theoretical “performance” of a language based on benchmarks and arcane tests. There have even been cases where vendors have built cheats into their products specifically so they would score well on benchmarks. In the end, runtime execution speed is not as important a factor as a lot of people would think it is if they only read about performance comparisons. Other factors such as maintainability, interoperability, developer productivity and tool and library support are all very significant, too.

Wait a minute, that sounds a lot like something else I’ve read recently!  Maybe something like this:

Is picking out the few performance weaknesses the right way to judge the
overall speed of Groovy?

To me the Groovy performance is absolutely sufficient because of the
easy integration with Java. If something’s too slow, I do it in Java.
And Java compared to Python is in most cases much faster.

I appreciate the efforts of the Groovy team to improve the performance,
but if they wouldn’t, this would be no real problem to me. Groovy is the
grooviest language with a development team always having the simplicity
and elegance of the language usage in mind - and that counts to me.  " src="http://www.codecommit.com/blog/wp-includes/images/smilies/icon_smile.gif">

This is almost a mantra for the Groovy proponents: performance is irrelevant.  What’s worse, is that the few times where they’ve been pinned down on a particular performance issue that’s obviously a problem, the response seems to be along the lines of: this test doesn’t really show anything, since micro-benchmarks are useless.

I’m sorry, but that’s a cop-out.  Face up to it, Groovy’s performance is terrible.  Anyone who claims otherwise is simply not looking at the evidence.  Oh, and if you’re going to claim that this is just a function of shoe-horning a dynamic language onto the JVM, check out a direct comparison between JRuby and and Groovy.  Groovy comes out ahead in only four of the tests.

Uh, oh.

(Editor's note: Head for the doors, folks--those guys in the corner wearing the black leather jackets sporting the "Grails Rulez" logos on the back have started to head for the center of the room, and they're looking drunk, mean, and angry.)

Here comes the coup de grace

What really bothers me about the Groovy performance debates is that most “Groovyists” seem to believe that performance is in the eye of the beholder.  The thought is that it’s all just a subjective issue and so should be discounted almost completely from the language selection process.  People who say this have obviously forgotten what it means to try to write a scalable non-trivial application which performs decently under load.  When you start getting hundreds of thousands of hits an hour, you’ll be willing to sell your soul for every last millisecond.

The only answer I can think of is that the Groovy core team just doesn’t value performance.  Why else would they consistently bury their heads in the sand, ignoring the issues even when the evidence is right in front of them?  It’s as if they have repeated their own “performance is irrelevant” mantra so many times that they are actually starting to believe it.  It’s unfortunate, because Groovy really is an interesting effort.  I may not see any value for my needs, but I can understand how a lot of people would.  It fills a nice syntactic niche that other languages (such as Ruby) just miss.  But all of its benefits are for naught if it can’t deliver when it counts.

That did it.

(Editor's note: Shiiiiiiiit! I didn't say nothing, HE did, why're you swinging that beer stein at *WHACK*)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

OK, now that we've gotten that out of our system, let's sit back and examine this issue more carefully, shall we?

The fact is, Groovy is slower than it should be. The Groovy guys can mumble about how performance isn't that important and that developer productivity is what really matters and similar kinds of rationale, but at the end of the day, the basic fact remains that Groovy is, by measurement of several different tests, at least an order of magnitude slower than compiled Java code.

Or is it? Funny thing is, looking at some of these tests, they don't say whether the Groovy code was compiled first, or run through the Groovy interpreter. Theoretically this shouldn't matter, since the Groovy architecture essentially compiles the classes generated once read, it might make a difference in practice.

Although Daniel's post doesn't mention it, I went back and double-checked. Peter Knego's benchmark says that "Groovy code was inside a Groovy script, compiled with groovyc.", which leads me to believe that it was compiled code rather than run through the Groovy shell interpreter, but it would be nice if the actual code and batch/command scripts that ran the benchmarks would be available. (He also notes that each time, the benchmark was "warmed up" by running the bechmark five or six times in a loop, presumably to allow the JIT to work its magic, but most notably, doesn't point out which JVM was used, -client or -server.) Meanwhile, Derek Young's ray-tracing example explicitly uses the Groovy interpreter, but defends that decision in comments: "The only reason I didn’t use groovyc was because the difference was so great, and the compilation overhead at the beginning of the run only takes a couple seconds. I decided it wasn’t worth waiting another two and a half hours to time the compiled output. Running with groovy first compiles the code just like groovyc does, then executes that code. It doesn't interpret the source code or run any differently."

So, apparently, it doesn't make much difference. That's not a good development for the Groovy language.

But let's put the hard numbers out of the way for a moment, and concentrate on the much bigger question: does the core Groovy team just not value performance? And, as a corollary to this, does the performance of a language really matter in a day and age when CPUs are still doubling in size and number of cores? Rick's (and others', including myself) positions on this seem fairly clear, that we long ago passed the threshold where programmer time became more expensive than CPU time, and therefore we should optimize based on programmer productivity, not CPU efficiency, and that's important to recognize: a language should enable the programmer to express the core idea without a great deal of "noise" or additional work, what Stu Halloway has coined as "ceremony", and certainly Groovy takes the Java programmer a step closer towards that place of lower ceremony.

But...

But I can't help it, folks. Ted's First Law of Computer Science states that "Dogma is the Root of All Evil", and holding scripting languages up as the last language you'll ever have to use is dogma, plain and simple. Ted's Second Law of Computer Science states, "Context matters", and in this case, the context includes the performance cost of using a language or tool. Taking a performance hit that weighs in at the orders of magnitude mark is just too big to ignore--the ray-tracing example, at its close-to-four-orders-of-magnitude hit, almost suggests that it would have been just as expensive to offload all those calculations through a distributed RPC call to another machine, rather than calculate it locally in Groovy, and when it becomes faster to go off-CPU to do a calculation than to do it locally, something is wrong.

And Daniel's point is good to hear clearly through the noise: "When you start getting hundreds of thousands of hits an hour, you’ll be willing to sell your soul for every last millisecond." Forget getting hundreds or thousands of hits an hour--the real test will be when the system gets hundreds or thousands of hits per second, that's when developers will be scrambling to find ways to eke out those last bits of performance from the system, even if it means selling their last Mountain Dew (which for some is pretty much synonymous to "soul") to whatever entity can give it to them.

So what exactly is my point with this particular entry, besides stirring the pot up a little? In order:

1. Measure for yourself. As with all things performance and scalability related, abstract benchmarks aren't a good measure of how well it works for you and your system. Build a prototype, measure, and then compare that against your performance and scalability goals. You did establish performance and scalability goals as part of your project's runup, right? (If you didn't, then you probably assume your users don't care about performance, and I suspect you'll be rudely surprised on the veracity of that statement before long...)
2. Benchmarks are tricky things. Programmers could learn something from politicians, and that is the imprecise nature of poll results. Thanks to the nature of statistical analysis and the sample size and source used to produce the poll, polls are always cited with a "plus or minus 3 percent" (or 5 percent, or 10 percent) to indicate the imprecision assumed in the poll. Benchmarks, both across languages and across other products, should be assumed to have similar kinds of imprecision. As people have already noted, benchmarks very quickly get "gamed" in order to produce results that are unfairly biased one way or another if they're not explicitly written and administered to be fair and equal to all sides involved. This isn't to say that benchmarks aren't useful, they're just not useful to a point more precise than rounding to the nearest 10% figure.
3. Groovy IS slower than it could or should be. As much as I like the people involved in the Groovy space, and as much as I like the language itself, I can't help but be very very worried that Groovy's performance numbers aren't anywhere close to where they should be. Yes, productivity will get you a long way in the technology-adoption market, but once people have adopted your language or tool, if your system proves to be unresponsive and performance-challenged, the doors letting people in will get blocked by the people trying to get out, and that's not good for Groovy.
4. Groovy's performance may not be a reason not to use Groovy. Let's be honest, again: productivity matters. This is Mort's principal goal, remember, and there's nothing wrong with it. Groovy fits into that most natural of places, a scripting language gluing together pieces written in a system language. Perl and Python serve the same purpose for native/C/C++ code, PowerShell does the same (I believe) for .NET code, and it's high time we see the value in doing that for Java code.
5. I believe that the core Groovy team holds performance as a value. I know Graeme and Guillaume, and I believe they believe in the value of performance. I believe that Groovy will get faster over time, as they discover new and better ways to compile Groovy code into bytecode. That doesn't mean users of Groovy should walk into this exercise with their eyes shut, mind you, but take the whole of this discussion into context as you figure out where Groovy can be used to make your life, as a developer, more productive and powerful. Certain parts of your system are perf-sensitive, and certain parts aren't. Identify which of those parts are which, and apply Groovy (and other tools) judiciously.
6. These discussions are always good, so long as they're held without rancor. Groovy doesn't suck. It has warts, but so does everything. Hushing them up or pooh-poohing them just leads to arguments--I encourage the Groovy team to take the criticism of Groovy's performance the way I intend it in this blog entry: a challenge to be faced and overcome, and not as an indictment of any and all Groovy code everywhere. Because, and I will say this outright, if Groovy's backers seriously mean Groovy as "a better Java 7", then they have a large gap to fill.

Oh, and if some of you wouldn't mind sticking around to clean up the mess...? Getting beer off the ceiling can be tricky.

Over on Channel 9, the video interview recorded with me during Lang.NET has gone live. Have a look, tell me what you think.

This email crossed my desk yesterday, courtesy of the MVP program:

Microsoft has recently released a public beta of IE8. Standards and security are of top importance in this release. To that end, the IE team is planning on releasing IE8 in full standards mode. Releasing in Full Standards Mode offers many benefits in the long term, but short term, could cause some end-user and developer issues. We would love to understand your thoughts around the impact of this specific issue and invite your suggestions on how we can best communicate it.

If you have thoughts and feedback on IE 8 releasing in full standards mode, please respond to the questions below and send your reply to jasontil@microsoft.com with “[IE8 Community Feedback]” in the subject line by this Friday, April 11^th at Noon, PDT.

1) IE8 releasing in expected to release in “standards mode”.

(a) What do people in your communities space think about this decision?

(b) What do you predict the impact to be on the customer and/or Developer experience?

(c) Do you have a recommendations on how best to share this information?

2) Our current plan is to communicate this heavily with web site owners and developers. We will be contacting top sites directly, distributing developer FAQs, and writing Knowledge Base articles on authoring to these standards.

(a) Do you think that will be effective at improving the customer experience?

(b) Are there other suggestions do you could offer to transition web sites to be standards-based or to improve the experience for users?

3) Is there anything else you or those in your communities wish to tell us about this issue to improve how we react and respond as Internet Explorer advances to release?

If you're a web developer, regardless of what your server-side language of choice is, you probably want to sign up for this, if only to get an early look at IE 8 and how it will, once again, change your life as a web developer. (Ditto for Firefox 3 and Safari, while we're at it.)

A couple of people have commented on the previous entry, citing, essentially, that Google needs to do this to be "the best". I understand the argument completely: Google wants to attract the top talent, or retain the top talent, or at least entice the top talent, not to mention give them every reason to be horribly productive, so all of that extravagance is a justifiable--and some might argue necessary--expense.

Thing is, I don't buy into that argument for a second. Talent wants to be rewarded, granted, but think about this for a moment: what kind of hours are these employees buying into by working there? There's an implicit tradeoff here, one that says, "If you are insanely productive, then the cost of this office is justified", meaning the pressure is on. Having an off day? Better pull the all-nighter to make up for it. Got stuck on something you didn't anticipate? Better pull the all-weekender to compensate. You're not in the bush leagues any more, sonny--you're at Google, and we paid a lot of money to make this office your home away from home, so snap to it!

I'm not suggesting that Goole is explicitly demanding this of their employees... but neither did Microsoft, back in the day.

See, all of this--including the justification arguments--is eerily reminiscent of Microsoft in their heyday, with the best example being the original Windows NT team. The hours they pulled over the last few months (some say years) of that project were nothing short of marathon sprints, and Microsoft laid everything they could at the feet of these developers (though nothing like what Google has built in Zurich, mind you) to help them focus on shipping the project.

The Wall Street Journal ran an article about the whole thing, and one quote from that article stuck with me: that the pressure to work the insanely long hours didn't come from upper management, but from the other developers on the team. "Are you signed up for this thing or not?" was a euphemism for "Why the hell are you leaving at 9PM? And you're not back until 8AM? What are you, some kind of slacker?" (I felt like screaming back, "Just say no!", and I wasn't even there.) The peer pressure was insane, and drove several members of the team to get outta Dodge as the first opportunity. Or some took off for bike rides across the country to recharge. Or some just... broke.

Microsoft doesn't do this anymore. Nobody is expected to put in 60 hour work weeks as a matter of course; now, the average is around 45, which I believe (though I have no factual evidence to support this) is about average for the industry as a whole. (C'mon, admit it, even if you're a strict 9-to-5'er, you still do a little reading at home or stick around after hours to help with the big rollout. It needs to be done, and you're professional enough to want to see it done right.)

In college, I learned a lot about startups and established companies. Like most of the folks I hung out with in college, I used to stay up way too late with friends hanging out at Woodstock's (the local pizzeria) arguing politics/sex/religion/operating systems or playing role-playing games*, then come home and bang out a 5-page paper in a few hours before cracking open my notes to study for the final that morning. I could do this without any real penalty, but I usually ended up taking the final, then coming back to my apartment and passing out for a few hours, only to awake to my roommates chanting "Piz-za! Piz-za! Piz-za!" and starting the whole thing over again. I was young, I had energy, I was fundamentally stupid, and I can't do that anymore. I can't sprint like that and still be able to function coherently over time, and as you get older, you realize that while college can be managed as a series of sprints, life requires you to have a more marathon attitude, particularly because you can't know when the sprints are coming, like they do in college.

As companies grow larger, their initial lifecycle is a series of sprints: roll the first release out, take a breather while the sales guys gather in the customer(s) and figure out what the next iteration will be, then do the whole thing over again. This effect is even more pronounced if the company has that one Really Big Customer, the one that represents some significant (over 50%) of the company's revenue; it's that company that drives the feature set and its delivery date. Meeting their needs and challenges becomes the source of the sprints to come.

As time goes on, however, and assuming the company has somehow managed to find success, they find that the Really Big Customer is actually now just one of several, and the features and the timing of the releases need to be balanced across the entire customer set. In other words, while some sprints are still necessary, the frequency and intensity begins to smooth out and the focus shifts to structure, pace, and consistency.

That is, if the company has successfully transitioned from "startup" to "established". Some startups never do, and try to sprint themselves from one scenario to the another, and eventually run themselves into the ground. Managing this transition isn't easy, and is something that generally only comes from having lived through it once or twice... or three or four times... Ah, good times.

Remember that whole "work/life balance" thing? We're discovering, over and over again, that having a good work/life balance is a key part of maintaining a sound outlook on life, much less your basic sanity. Creating a "home away from home" where employees can put in insane amount of hours is not healthy "work/life balance"... unless you presume your company will be staffed with fresh-from-college twenty-something singles who have nobody to go home to and all their friends in the office. And that, folks, is not a sustainable model.

Point is, Google's extravagance here smacks of startups, sprints, and fevered intensity. What's worse, I hear little bits and pieces of rumors that Google reveres the eleventh-hour developer-god who swoops in, pulls the all-weeker to get the release out the door, to high praise from management and his/her peers.

That's not sustainable, and the sooner Google--or any other company, for that matter--realizes that, the better they will be in the long term.

* - Does this really surprise you? Yes, I am a huge geek.

Kohsuke Kawagachi has posted a blog entry describing how to watch the assembly code get generated by the JVM during execution, using a non-product (debug or fastdebug) build of Hotspot and the -XX:+PrintOptoAssembly flag, a trick he says he learned while at TheServerSide Java Symposium a few weeks ago in Vegas. He goes on to do some analysis of the generated assembly instructions, offering up some interesting insights into the JVM's inner workings.

There's only one problem with this: the flag doesn't exist.

Looking at the source for the most recent builds of the JVM (b24, plus whatever new changesets have been applied to the Mercurial repositories since then), and in particular at the "globals.hpp" file (jdk7/hotspot/src/share/vm/runtime/globals.hpp), where all the -XX flags are described, no such flag exists. It obviously must have at one point, since he's obviously been able to use it to get an assembly dump (as must whomever taught him how to do it), but it's not there anymore.

OK, OK, I lied. It never was there for the client build (near as I can tell), but it is there if you squint hard enough (jdk7/hotspot/src/share/vm/opto/c2_globals.hpp), but as the pathname to the source file implies, it's only there for the server build, which is why Kohsuke has to specify the "-server" flag on the command line; if you leave that off, you get an error message from the JVM saying the flag is unrecognized, leading you to believe Kohsuke (and whomever taught him this trick) is clearly a few megs shy in their mental heap. So when you try this trick, make sure to use "-server", and make sure to run methods enough to force JIT to take place (or set the JIT threshold  using -XX:CompileThreshold=1) in order to see the assembly actually get generated.

Oh, and make sure to swing the dead chicken--fresh, not frozen--by the neck over your head three times, counterclockwise, while facing the moon and chanting, "Ohwah... Tanidd... Eyah... Tiam...". If you don't, the whole thing won't work. Seriously.

...

Ever feel like that's how we tune the JVM? Me too. The whole thing is this huge black box, and it's nearly impossible to extract any kind of useful information without wandering into the scores of mysterious "-XX" flags, each of which is barely documented, not guaranteed to do anything visibly useful, and barely understood by anybody outside of Sun.

Hey, at least we have those flags in the JVM; the CLR developers have to take whatever the Microsoft guys give them. ("And they'll like it, too! Why, when I was their age, I had to program using nothing but pebbles by the side of the road on my way to school! Uphill! Both ways! In the raging blizzards of Arizona!")

Interestingly enough, this conversation got me into an argument with a friend of mine who works for Sun.

During the conversation, I mentioned that I was annoyed at the difficulty a Java developer has in trying to see how the Java code he/she writes turns into assembly, making it hard to understand what's really happening inside the black box. After all, the CLR makes this pretty trivial--when you set a breakpoint in Visual Studio, if you have the right flags turned on, your C# or VB source is displayed alongside the actual native instructions, making it fairly easy to see that the JITted code. This was always of great help when trying to prove to skeptical C++ developers that the CLR wasn't entirely brain-dead, and did a lot of the optimizations their favorite C++ compiler did, in some cases even better than the C++ compiler might have done. "Why don't we have some kind of double-X-show-me-the-code flag, so I can do the same with the JVM?", I lamented.

His contention was that this lack of a flag is a good thing.

Convinced I was misunderstanding his position, I asked him what he meant by that, and he said, roughly paraphrasing, that there are only about 20 or so people in the world who could look at that assembly dump and not draw incredibly misguided impressions of how the JVM operates internally; more importantly, because so few people could do anything useful with that output, it was to our collective benefit that this information was so hard to obtain.

To quote one of my favorite comedians, "Well excuuuuuuuuuuse ME." I was a bit... taken aback, shall we say.

I understand his point--that sometimes knowledge without the right context around it can lead to misinterpretation and misunderstanding. I'll agree totally with the assertion that the JVM is an incredibly complex piece of software that does some very sophisticated runtime analysis to get Java code to run faster and faster. I'll even grant you that the timing involved in displaying the assembly dump is critical, since Hotspot re-JITs methods that get used repeatedly, something the CLR has talked about ("code pitching") but thus far hasn't executed on.

But this idea that only a certain select group of people are smart enough and understand the JVM well enough to interpret the results correctly? That's dangerous, on several levels.

First, it's potentially an elitist attitude to take, essentially presenting a "We look down on you poor peasants who just don't get it" persona, and if word gets out that this is how Sun views Java developers as a whole, then it's a black mark on Sun's PR image and causes them some major pain and credibility loss. Now, let me brutally frank here: For the record, I don't think this is the case--everybody I've met at Sun thus far is helpful and down-to-earth, and scary-smart. I have a hard time believing that they're secretly thumbing their nose at me. I suppose it's possible, but it's also possible that Bill Gates and Scott McNealy were in cahoots the whole time, too.

Second, and more importantly, there will never be any more than those 20 people we have now, unless Sun works to open the deep dark internals of the JVM to more people. I know I'm not alone in the world in wanting to know how the JVM works at the same level as I know how the CLR works, and now that the OpenJDK is up and running, if Sun wants to see any patches or feature enhancements from the community, then they need to invest in more educational infrastructure to get those of us who are interested in this stuff more up to speed on the topic.

Third, and most important of all, so long as the JVM remains a black box, the "myths, legends and lore" will haunt us forever. Remember when all the Java performance articles went on and on about how method marked "final" were better-performing and so therefore should be how you write your Java code? Now, close to ten years later, we can look back at that and laugh, seeing it for the micro-optimization it is, but if challenged on this idea, we have no proof. There is no way to create demonstrable evidence to prove or disprove this point. Which means, then, that Java developers can argue this back and forth based on nothing more than our mental model of the JVM and what "logically makes sense".

Some will suggest that we can use micro-benchmarks to compare the two options and see how, after a million iterations, the total elapsed time compares. Brian Goetz has spent a lot of time and energy refuting this myth, but to put it in some degree of perspective, a micro-benchmark to prove or disprove the performance benefits of "final" methods is like changing the motor oil in your car and then driving across the country over and over again, measuring how long until the engine explodes. You can do it, but there's going to be so much noise from everything else around the experiment--weather, your habits as a driver, the speeds at which you're driving, and so on--that the results will be essentially meaningless unless there is a huge disparity, capable of shining through the noise.

This is a position born out across history--we've never been able to understand a system until we can observe it from outside the system; examples abound, such as the early medical understanding of Aristotle's theories weighed against the medical experiments performed by the Renaissance thinkers. One story says a skeptic, looking at the body in front of him disproving one of Aristotle's theories, shook his head and said, "I would believe you except that it was Aristotle who said it." When mental models are built on faith, rather than on fact and evidence, progress cannot reasonably occur.

Don't think the analogy holds? How long did we as Java developers hold faith with the idea that object pools were a good idea, and that objects are expensive to create, despite the fact that the Hotspot FAQ has explicitly told us otherwise since JDK 1.3? I still run into Java developers who insist that object pools are a good idea all across the board. I show them the Hotspot FAQ page, and they shake their head and say, "I would believe you except that it was (so-and-so article author) who said it."

Oh, and don't get me started on a near-total opacity of the Parrot and Ruby environments, among others--this isn't a "static vs dynamic" thing, this is something everybody running on a managed platform needs to be able to do.

I'm tired of arguing from a position of faith. I want evidence to either prove or disprove my assertions, and more importantly, I want my mental model of how the JVM operates to improve until it's more reflective of and closer to the reality. I can't do that until the JVM offers up some mechanisms for gathering that evidence, or at least for gathering it more easily and comprehensively. You shouldn't have to be a JVM expert to get some verification that your understanding of how the JVM works is correct or incorrect.

Check out this video. No, go on, watch it. The rest of this won't make much sense until you do.

Now that you've seen it, take a moment, do the "WOW" thing in your head, imagine how cool it would be to work there, all of it. Go on, I know you want to, I did too when I first saw it. Go ahead, take a moment; you'll be distracted until you do, and you'll miss the rest of the point of this blog entry, and then I'll be sad. Go on, now. Here, I'll do it with you, even.

Mmmmmm. Slide to lunch. Ahhhh. Massage chair in front of the fish tank. Wow, just think of how cool it must be to work at Google. I mean, they work hard and all, but still... now there's a company that knows how to take care of its engineers, right?

OK, daydreaming done? Let's think about this for a moment.

First, how can anybody get anything done with all that noise surrounding them? Oh, I don't mean actual audio noise, I know they've created quiet zones and all that, I mean the myriad distractions that float around that office building. I'll be honest--I find myself getting work done better in an environment without that additional stimulus and excitement (legacy of my ADD, I'm sure). Knowing that I could just nip on over to the video game room to spend some "thinking time" in front of an all-you-can-play Galaga machine would drive me batty.

Maybe that's just me, and others are just begging to be given the chance to prove me wrong, and if that's the case, then by all means, please feel free. But I've heard this same experience from lots of people doing the work-at-home thing, and I don't think the anecdotal evidence here is widely skewed. Sometimes you want work to be... just work. Vanilla, boring, and predictable.

Don't get me wrong--I don't exactly look forward to my next engagement that plops me down in the middle of the cube farm--there's a continuum here, and Google is clearly far on the opposite end of that spectrum from the Dilbert-esque cubicle prairie as anyone can get. But had I my personal preference here, it would be a desk, fairly plain, comfortable, yet focused more on the functional than the "fun".

But second, there's a deeper concern that I have, one which I worry a lot more about than just peoples' preference in work space.

When's the last time you saw this kind of extravagance being lavished on developers? For me, it was at a number of different Silicon Valley firms during the dot-com boom of the late 90's... and all of those firms are dessicated remains of what they once were, or else dried up completely into dust and have long since blown away with the coastal breeze. This was classic startup behavior: drop a ton of money

I'll call it: If Google sees nothing wrong with this kind of extravagance in setting up an office, then they have just done their first evil.

Pause for a moment to think about the costs involved in setting up that office. I submit to you, dear reader, that Google is being financially irresponsible with that office, all nice perks aside. Google's money machine isn't going to last forever--nobody's ever does--and the company (desperately, IMHO) needs to find something else to prove to Wall Street and Developer Street that they're still a company that knows how to write cool software and make money. (Plenty of companies write cool software, and close their doors a few years later, and plenty of companies know how to make money, but having a company who can do both is a real rarity.)

Look at Google's habits right now: they're pouring money out left and right in an effort to maintain or improve the Google "image"; tons of giveaways at conferences, tons of offices all across the world, incredible office spaces like the one in the video, and a ton of projects created by Google engineers just because said engineers think it's cool. While that's a developer's dream, it doesn't pay the rent. I want to work for a company that offers me a creative, productive work environment, true, but more than that, I want to work for a company that knows how to make sure my checks still cash. (Yes, I remember the late 90's well, and the collapse that followed.)

I'm worried about Google--they appear to be on a dangerous arc, spending in what would seem to be far greater excess of what they're taking in, and that's not even considering some of the companies they would be well-advised to consider buying in order to flush out more of their corporate profile (which is its own interesting discussion, one for a later day). What is Google's principal source of income right now? Near as I can tell, it's AdWords, and I just can't believe that the AdWords gravy train will run any longer than...

... well, than the DOS gravy train. Granted, that train ran for a long time, but eventually it ran out, and the company had to find alternative sources of income. Microsoft did, and now it's Google's turn to prove they can put money back into their corporate coffers.

The parallels between Google and Microsoft are staggering, IMHO.

Recently I received a press announcement from Waggener-Edstrom, Microsoft's PR company, about their latest move in the interoperability space; I reproduce it here in its entirety for your perusal:

Hi Ted,

Microsoft is announcing another action to promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice across the IT industry of developers, partners, customers and competitors. 

Today Microsoft is posting additional documentation of the XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) formats for advanced user experiences, enabling third parties to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server and tool products.  This documentation is publicly available, for no charge, at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=113699 . 

It will assist developers building non-Microsoft clients and servers to read and write XAML to process advanced user experiences – with lots of animation, rich 2D and 3D graphic and video. Specifically, non-Microsoft servers can more easily generate XAML files to be handled, for example, by applications running on Windows client machines.  In addition, non-Microsoft clients can be written more easily to interpret XAML files. This action will assist ISVs in creating design tools and file format converters to read and write XAML to create advanced user experiences.

Microsoft is making this documentation available under the Microsoft Open Specification Promise (OSP), which will allow developers of all types anywhere in the world to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server or tool products without having to take a license or pay a fee to Microsoft.

The following quote is attributable to Tom Robertson, general manager, Interoperability and Standards, Microsoft.

“Microsoft’s posting of the expanded set of XAML format documentation to assist third parties to access and implement the XAML formats in their own client, server and tool products will help promote interoperability, opportunity and choice across the IT community.  Use of the Open Specification Promise assures developers that they can use any Microsoft patents needed to implement all or part of the XAML formats for free, anywhere in the world, now and in the future.” 

Please let me know if you have any questions or if I can provide you with any additional information. 

Best,

N--

This marks the most recent in a slew of efforts by the Borg of the Pacific Northwest to "promote greater interoperability, opportunity and choice", and I know it's left a lot of people feeling decidedly skeptical and... well, let's just call it what it is, paranoid, about the company's plans and ulterior motive behind all these efforts. After all, this is the company that tried to co-opt Java, put Stacker out of business, used their monopoly operating system power to crush Novell, used their monopoly office suite power to crush the Mac, bribe an entire country to vote their way on the new office-file specifications, and I don't know what all else.

I know, I know, all my blog-readers who work at Microsoft are going nuts right now, protesting, claiming that this isn't the same company that they work for now, and so on. Fact is, folks, if you work at Microsoft, you work for a company whose name is not well-received in many quarters, and while some of it is undeserved... some of it is. Microsoft has done some pretty stupid things in its history, and if that reputation doesn't sit well with you now, I can't help but wonder if somewhere in that great Corporate Heaven, Stac Electronics isn't just jumping up and down, foaming at the mouth and screaming, "Ha! Serves you right!"

I don't want to use this blog as a chance for everybody who ever got burned by Microsoft (or thought they got burned by Microsoft, which is much more widespread and just as much more likely to be in their own minds) to trot out "reap and sow" cliches. Instead, I want to revisit one of my favorite topics, that of interoperability, and see exactly what this new shift in Microsoft's attitude towards interoperability really means.

Let's take these one at a time. Note that I have no "Deep Throat" at Microsoft feeding me "the Redmondagon Papers"; this is all based on my own conjecture and perspective.

What does releasing the XAML spec really mean?

Honestly, it means that now non-Microsoft platforms can try to create competitors to Aero and Windows Presentation Foundation, and have the same kind of rich client experiences that Windows users can enjoy.

Honestly, I expect this to go pretty much nowhere.

Realistically speaking, if a non-Microsoft app server wanted to generate XAML, it was a simple matter of generating the appropriate XML, tagging it with an appropriate MIME type in the HTTP header, and serving it up over an HTTP request; I've been giving this demo at conferences for three or four years now, pretty much since the first betas of WPF were stable enough to use. This really isn't rocket science.

But more importantly, XAMl has always been misunderstood: it's not a presentation format, it's an object graph format. XAML simply "wires up" a collection of objects into a tree, and it's the underlying object model that provides the functionality or power or presentation or whatever. It's an easier way of writing "Button b = new Button(...);", nothing more, nothing less. Sure, it would be nice to have some kind of equivalent for the Swing space, but doing so would tie the corresponding XML (XSML?) to the Swing APIs, just as WPF XAML is tied to the WPF API.

Does releasing the XAML specs mean that now Linux and Mac OS will get WPF features?

They've had them for years, in the guise of the OpenGL APIs, and nobody knew what to do with them, except maybe for a sliver of folks building games and interesting "effects". Unless somebody really feels the desire to try and create an adapter layer to map the WPF Button over to an OpenGL button, I really don't see much point.

This is one of the most dangerous points in the discussion: attempting to build an adapter to another platform's API is almost always a failed experiment from the day it's begun, and Microsoft's own attempt to port the MFC APIs over to the Mac OS (back in the pre-OS X days, circa 1995) were just a miserable, abject failure. Not because of any lack of intelligence on Microsoft's part, mind you, but because the two operating systems are just too different. Want to see what I mean? Bring a Mac guy and a Windows guy into the same room, and ask them each where God intended the menu bar to live.

Then creep, quietly, out of the room, before you get caught in the blood frenzy.

Why does Microsoft suddenly care about interoperability?

This is the crown jewel of the lot: why should this company, so famous for going it alone on so many issues, suddenly decide that it's important for them to embrace the other kids on the playground and make nice? Is this back to the "embrace" part of the "embrace and extend and extinguish" cycle that they're so famous for?

Partly.

To understand the point I am about to make, let's set some context.

(In other words, gather 'round, children, it's story time.)

Truth is, there was a time back there in the '90s when I think Microsoft really thought they could take over the world. COM was on the ascendancy, and it was a better platform for building software than anything else out there (at the time), particularly in the area of building rich media applications (remember when embedding a sound clip into your email message embedded inside your spreadsheet was all the rage?). The CORBA initiative was going strong, true, but its great claim to fame was to allow two remote processes to talk to one another--the rest of the CORBA "push" was in standards that either never materialized, or else materialized but turned out to be really hard to build, or use, or deploy, or all of the above. IBM's great competitor--SOM--wasn't even in beta on anything other than OS/2 (another great IBM product). Then, when DCOM shipped, it was seen by some as the final nail in the CORBA coffin; Microsoft clearly was going to "win".

Along came Java.

Java literally took the rug out from underneath the COM platform, almost overnight. It provided a platform with most of the same benefits as the COM/DCOM platform, but without having to memorize the QueryInterface rules or knowing what IUnknown was or how IDispatch was required to work or how static_cast<> and dynamic_cast<> and QueryInterface were all related. ("Would you, should you, static_cast? Not if you want your code to last..." Ah, those were heady days.) Suddenly, "mere mortals" could program on this platform, and feel a strong sense of confidence that their code would work, over time, regardless of whether they remembered to set references to null when they were done with them.

At first, Microsoft was "down with it", because in Java they saw a great marriage: the Java language as the "sweet spot" between C++'s expressive power and VB's layers of abstraction, running on top of the JVM as a "sweet spot" intermingled with the COM platform to provide the easiest, most powerful Windows programming environment yet. Visual J++ was clearly the favored child of the litter.

And then the lawyers got involved, and Sun saw their chance to steal a march on Microsoft, and maybe break the feared operating system monopolist, and maybe even get a few more percentage points for Solaris (because, after all, "Write Once, Run Anywhere" meant that you wouldn't have to run sucky operating systems like Windows and instead could trade up to real operating systems like Solaris, right? Hey, where'd that penguin come from, anyway, and why is he eating all our fish?). Sun refused to let Microsoft's marriage of the JVM (technically the MSVM) and COM take place, and Microsoft, rather than seek to fight it out, instead decided to cede the battle, and look for a battleground of their own choosing, instead. Thus was the thing that would become called ".NET" born.

But this "master plan" would take four or so years to develop, and in the meantime...

... in the meantime, EJB and Servlets and later J2EE and "app servers" and Spring and all those wonderful things that came with them, they were eating Microsoft's lunch. Comparing J2EE (even with EJB in the mix!) with the complexities of writing unmanaged COM code on top of COM+ is simply no comparison--again, the power of the managed platform simply proved to be too hard to turn away without compelling reason, and the COM/DCOM/COM+ story simply didn't have that compelling reason. Microsoft watched their "inevitable victory" sail into the sunset without them, just as the Department of Justice came up to them and shackled them with the first of many, many papers about "anti-competitive practices".

In many respects, the positions got reversed--Sun inherited a huge share (an unhealthy dose, in fact) of Microsoft's arrogance, and for a long time there, thought they were suddenly destiny's child, that Java (meaning Sun, of course) would be the one to "win", and thus would Sun's assurance of world dominance thus be assured.

Except it didn't play out that way.

Sun found that by embracing standards over implementations, they spent long hours thrashing out specifications, only to provide instant credibility to other vendors' products while their own languished. Weblogic stole the EJB early adopter window. A number of small vendors provided servlet implementations before Tomcat was born... which, although written by Sun employees, was an open-source project and yielded no financial benefit. JMS... well, JMS was always the redheaded stepchild of the J2EE family, at least until vendors like Sonic and Fiorano rescued it for the common Java programmer. (Those who'd been using IBM MQSeries all the while never really could see why you'd want to program against JMS APIs instead of IBM's own.) In each and every case, Sun found their product to be the third or fourth entry into the race, usually years after the others had started, and as a result....

Meanwhile, back in Redmond....

Microsoft comes to the game with .NET in 2003. (The early betas don't count because many people openly wonder if Microsoft is really serious about this ".NET" thing in the first place. After all, remember Microsoft Bob?) And despite .NET's obvious advantage of being formulated nearly a decade after Java's initial release, thus able to apply hindsight to fix or improve the obvious blemishes in the Java environment, Microsoft finds that they're playing catch-up in the all-too-important enterprise space. Microsoft's tools and products have always been seen as "second-class citizens" to the "big boys" in the enterprise space, particularly at the ends of the "high scale" continuum, and the lack of an obvious "app server" in the .NET arena only serves to underscore and reinforce that opinion among many large firms.

More importantly, Microsoft doesn't ever want to get blindsided by the Java experience again. They want to make sure that they are never in a position where it looks like their tools are vastly out-of-date, underfeatured, underpowered, and underused. They need to remain somewhere near the bleeding edge, but not so close that their customers are the ones doing the bleeding.

(We pause for the inevitable Vista joke.)

To Microsoft, Java is that near-death experience that pulls many adrenaline (and other) junkies back from the brink they so callously teetered on before. They need some kind of forward progress, some kind of advancement in the game, so that their customers and their would-be customers feel like Microsoft is on top of it at all times.

Result: Somewhere in the 2000-2003 timeframe, Microsoft looks around, sees the landscape, and realizes it needs to make itself relevant to a largely J2EE-based universe, and fast.

At first, Microsoft sees a play through the establishment of some standards between the big vendors, around this new "XML" thing, a largely portable data format, and so they throw themselves heart and soul into that space. Doing so will allow them to show existing J2EE-based shops that the power of the .NET platform lies in complementing the existing infrastructure, not replacing it. (Microsoft is smart enough to realize that preaching the software equivalent of hellfire-and-brimstone, known as "rip-and-replace", will not cater well to this congregation.)

(Rubyists could have learned a valuable lesson here, but either weren't paying attention, didn't realize the value of the lesson, or else just chose not to.)

But this play doesn't turn out the way they expect: the WS-* standards become top-heavy, and start to resemble the very thing Microsoft sought to smash fifteen years earlier: CORBA. The number of WS- specifications available through the W3C (and OASIS, and WS-I and whatever other industry consortiums are formed) is exceeded only by the number of Cos- specifications available from the OMG. The complexities therein leave many Java--and .NET--programmers confused, bewildered, and hopelessly lost when trying to get all but the most simple services to work. Thus does the community turn to alternatives--JSON, simple sockets, REST, whatever--to try and find something that works, even if it only addresses a subset of the problems they will eventually face.

Meanwhile...

Open source grows ever more important, and Microsoft-the-company realizes they have to either kill it or join it. It's hard to kill something that has no body (unlike their previous competitors), so joining it is the only viable option. Unlike many other software product companies, however, Microsoft has too large an established software base to just "flip the switch", and has far too deeply entrenched a corporate community to take any kind of radical action without a well-thought plan. (Wall Street, a place few programmers ever bother to consider, much less visit, would not take kindly to Microsoft essentially giving away their core product without something in its place to generate revenue, and regardless of how many programmers would like to imagine a world with a bankrupt Microsoft, this would be bad for business for everybody.)

And thus do we come to the present.

Microsoft needs a play that is Wall Street friendly, programmer friendly, and corporate friendly. They are slowly flirting more and more deeply with open source, yet still firmly committed to turning a profit (something a few of these other open-source-based companies should probably learn to do at some point--just maneuvering to the point of being bought out by a larger fish, like Oracle, is not really a long-term competitive strategy, just so you know).

Microsoft wants--arguably, needs--to keep Office relevant in a world where software isn't always paid for, so they need a play that keeps Office ubiquitous and out in the forefront of developer mindshare. If they can't get you to buy Office, then at least let's get you to use tools that keep the Office file formats ubiquitous. If (and this is a big "if") the Office formats turn out to be technically superior to their competition, then Microsoft succeeds. If not, they find a new play.

In the short, Microsoft needs an interoperability story, and they need a real interoperability play, because their reputation is damaged from the many "embrace, extend, extinguish" plays they've made in the past. The era of a large vendor "winning" is clearly well behind us (if it was ever, in fact, more than just a marketing VP's wet dream), and if Microsoft is going to make sure that they're never in a vulnerable come-from-behind position again, they need to make sure that they can work well with all the other new technologies out there, whether up-and-coming or well-established or even fading-fast. They need to have an interoperability story that developers can believe in, which means some kind of open-source-friendly play, and one that carries serious "street cred" for actually working.

What's the lesson that I, a developer, take away from this?

If you are a Java developer, get past your old prejudices and accept that .NET is a viable platform. The Java developer who refuses to learn how to write C# code on the grounds that "Micro$oft is a company that just puts out crap" or that "M$FT sux" is going to be a Java developer whose value to the business is reduced compared to those with less virulent politics. Thanks to tools like VMWare and Virtual PC, you don't have to give up your Mac or your Linux environment to write .NET code and prove that you can offer value to those projects that need to talk to .NET. Look into more than just the WS-* or REST stacks for communication, as well; explore some of the interoperability options I've been ranting about for four years, a la IKVM, Jace, Hessian, even CORBA.

If you are a Ruby developer, get over yourself and your "we're more agile and more powerful" meme. Ruby is a tool, nothing more, and one whose shine is fast coming off. IT organizations are discovering the myriad problems with the original Ruby runtime, and are unwilling to risk enterprise apps on a runtime that has zero monitoring and zero manageability play. Yes, you can certainly do lots of things yourself to make your Ruby apps more manageable and more monitorable--but that's all time you have to spend building it, or figuring out how to hook it into the existing IT infrastructure, and when all that time gets added up, it's not going to look all that different from a Java or .NET app's timecycle arc. If you don't have an answer to the question, "How will we make this work with the existing infrastructure we've got?", then you have a problem, and no amount of chanting "Obi-Dave Thomas-Kenobi, you and dynamic typing are my only hope" will save you.

If you are a .NET developer, it's high time you accepted that the Java folks are about five years ahead of you on this "managed code" arc, and that they suffered through a lot of hard lessons before arriving at the decisions they came to. Don't be stupid, learn from their mistakes. Why do Java programmers chant "dependency injection" with holy fervor? Why do Java programmers put so much stress on unit testing? What has Microsoft not given you with the latest release of Visual Studio that Java developers think you're an idiot for not demanding in the next release? Yes, C# has some interesting new features in it that Java-the-language doesn't have... but why are the Java guys getting all misty-eyed over Groovy? What do they know that you don't?

If you are a developer outside of these areas, you're swimming in dangerous waters, because while I'm sure you're not having any problems finding a job, chances are your next job is going to require you to talk to one of those three environments. Better have your integration/interoperability story worked out, whether its Phalanger for the PHP developer who needs to talk to .NET (and damn if PHP script driving a WinForms app isn't an interesting idea in of itself... and a useful way to bridge yourself into an entirely new area of employment), or its figuring out how to apply your mad Haskell skillz to F# or Scala, you need to have a good idea of what those languages are (and aren't) and how your knowledge of functional concepts can catapult you to the head of the class the next time a massively-scalable system needs to be built.

If you are a Microsoft employee, don't blow this. Don't make this into another "embrace, extend, extinguish" cycle. Accept that your company made some bone-headed maneuvers in the past, and rather than try to defend them, accept that your reputation outside of the Redmond Reality-Distortion Bubble is not what it looks like from the inside. As hard as this will be to do sometimes, just stop and listen to what others are saying about the company and the paranoia that creeps up every time Microsoft moves into an area of interest. Take the extra moment to hear the concerns, not just the words.

And if you are a Google employee, tatoo this on your forehead: Reputation Matters. The first time anybody at your company does something even remotely "evil", you will be branded as "the next Microsoft" and all of these problems will be yours to share and enjoy, as well.