Tilera 64-core CPU: The Future Cometh

Looks like the only programming tools for Tilera's 64-Core CPU is a C compiler, but the day is fast approaching when we're going to start seeing more and more of these types of tools in the mainstream.

more ...

Data Volumes Trumping Core Multiplication? Interesting Thought

Bill de h?ra makes an intriguing pitch that programming will be impacted by increasing data volumes more than by the transition to multi-/many-core. His basis is anecdotal -- we don't have the same metaphysical certainty that all of us will be dealing with much-larger datasets as we have the …

more ...

Moving Beyond The Typing Debate?

Maybe the readers of my blog are more astute (and better looking!) than average, but I was happy that several comments to my recent post on type inference were properly dismissive of what one called "the static vs. dynamic holy war." As I said when writing about the myth of …

more ...

IBM's Telelogic Acquisition: Buying Marketshare, Not Expanding Market

I agree with Alan Zeichick's analysis of IBM's acquisition of modeling tool vendor Telelogic:  the overlap with IBM's Rational product line is high, the acquisition "is a bid to buy market share....we've taken a powerful innovator and strong IBM competitor out of the market."

The software development industry typically …

more ...

How Much of the Industry Will Go Parallel?

Michael Seuss ponders one of my favorite questions: How much of the software industry will have to deal with the concurrent computing [opportunity]? He hits the vital points:

  • 2, 4, and maybe 8 cores may be usefully exploited by system services (anti-virus, disk indexing and searching, etc.), but when you …
more ...

Microsoft's Popfly: Getting Their Ducks In A Row

Popfly is the name (and URL) of Microsoft's new non-professional developer community, a Windows Live site whose flashiest feature is a Silverlight-based "mashup editor" that facilitates pipes-and-filters development. Before reviewing the gratuitous 3-D spinning cubes, though, pay attention to the context:

  • Visual Studio Express has had 14,000,000 downloads …
more ...

IronPython, IronRuby Discussion with Jim Hugunin and Jon Lam

I'm dying because I've just had a long talk with two of Microsoft's heavy hitters on the Dynamic Languages Runtime (DLR) team and have much to discuss, yet I am in a frenzy preparing for a business trip and cannot yet take the time to do the discussion any kind …

more ...

Sun's Fortress Language : Looks Very Well Designed

This is a rather daunting (124 slide) PDF on Sun's "Fortress" programming language, designed in large part by \<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_L._Steele%2c_Jr."" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Guy Steele, which is designed for scientific / mathematical programming. It looks really good -- lots of …

more ...

Thread Creation Overhead Can Trip Up Pros

Michael Seuss has a good blog piece on \<a href="http://www.thinkingparallel.com/2007/05/02/parallel-programming-fun-with-loop-carried-dependencies/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">parallelizing code that contains loop-carried dependenciess, which is to say, code such as the following, where the calculation in one pass is dependent on a previous pass' …

more ...

Dynamic Language Runtime: PHP, Scheme, and "maybe one more" coming

The preliminary documentation for the DLR is included in the IronPython-2.0A1-Doc.zip download at http://www.codeplex.com/IronPython/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=438 :

We're leveraging the learning we did on IronPython to extract elements that could be common amongst languages (dynamic type system, hosting APIs, cached method dispatch …

more ...