Java: not the best language to teach at schools?

"Computer Science Education: Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow?" dogs Java as the one and only programming language to teach but does include it as one of 5 languages recommended languages to learn (C, C++, LISP and Ada are the other 4).

Personally, I'd wish they work on a better programming language(s) to teach the right concepts rather than trying to create a better hi-tech vocational courses based on the most desired languages by employers. It's unfortunate that people get hired based on their specific language skills rather than understanding concepts and ability solve problems. Sigh...

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Kaiser Software falling down.

LA Times reports "Kaiser has aches, pains going digital: Patients' welfare is at stake in the electronic effort, experts say."

Like any big software project, it's never easy to replace an existing system, be it manual/paper system or software [mainframe] system. Either way, the problem is always with the software people: the architects and business analysts since their understand of the requirements are never complete and always behind the curve plus the programmers learn new things in the process of coding and want to do things better [and should be done so that it will be easier to maintain in the future]. Even something as small as web programming can take an inordinate more time than estimated, as we're finding out with my current work.

Copyright, 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Adventure Author: yet another game programming tool

It seems there is another game programming system or language: Adventure Author. It seems to be focused on creating adventure games, which is good for story telling games but not so much for non-linear games . And they don't have anything for download (as far as I can tell), so it can't be tried out.

It's hard to compare against other tools like, say, Alice.

Copyright 2007, DannyHSDad, All Rights Reserved.

Beauty in simplicity

"The beauty of Simplicity" hits at why Google is so popular: simple yet functional. Same with iPod: clean interace for handling thousands if not millions of music in one box.

I believe the same about programming: if things can be made simple (like Stagecast) while being very powerful like C/C++, I believe that programming would become as common as googlers and podcasters. I think Smalltalk is a good start but by being pure VM based (like Java), it has some limits which can done better if it was more like Forth with machine code level access to the hardware. Security issues can be mitigated by using the hypervisor or virtualization technologies to isolate programmers from corrupting other partitions (LPAR or logical partition is what IBM likes to call the individual instance of virtualized "machine" -- not to be confused with virtual machine or VM of Smalltalk and Java).

GC and beyond

Last night I was playing with Squeak/Croquet. And it is an impressive tool/environment. However, I noticed that it was very slow to come up. Once it was "alive" the 3d graphics was very responsive on my computer (top of the line notebook when I bought it 2 months ago). Almost like playing a 3d shoot'em up game.

I've been thinking about this slowness since then, off and on, and this morning it hit me: Why not optimize code behind the scene just like GC (garbage collection)? Just as GC automatically collects and cleans up dynamic memory usage inside one's code, background optimizer (how about BGO since BO has negative connotation) can look at execution flow and optimize code while things are running. Unlike FX!32 (which optimized x86 machine code into Alpha machine code), this would look at the higher level usage of the language. [Note that I'm talking about doing it in a VM or virtual machine for languages like Smalltalk or Java.]

This article "Virtual Machines and the OS" talks about BGO in a similar way. I like the idea of being able to optimize the VM itself and even sharing this via network. With open source sharing of ideas and peer reviews and even formal proofs, "correct" optimization can even be automatically patched into the VM (much like we do patching of Windows or Linux via the network).

Run-time code optimization is not enough, however. I want something like MTSO (multi-thread synchronization optimizer). With multi-core world that we live in today, you cannot avoid writing multi-threaded programs which means you will have to deal with mutex (mutual exclusion of shared resources) and (synchronous and/or asynchronous) communications between the threads. These are the trickiest issues of writing multi-threaded software and if it can be done under the covers (and optimized during run-time) then it would ease both maintenance and debug of the code. Obviously for a closed system like game console this run-time optimization would have to be done preproduction so that completely optimized version can be fixed in a read-only media (ROM used to mean Memory but Media is probably more appropriate today).

Optimizing for hetreogenous multiprocessor (or AMP, Asymmetric Multi-Processor) environment would be taking this to the next level. Some fancy chips like Cell processor has one main CPU and 8 sub-CPU or coprocessors. Fortunately, you don't have to use any exotic chip to be in this environment. Most computers are AMP today: There are two unique components in the computers: CPU (central processing unit) and graphics chip(s). Most graphics chips today are programmable and are generally called GPU (graphics processing unit) and can do some extra processing beyond the CPU. With BGO, it can optimize code to run on free cycles of the GPU.

With all this optimization going on, next level of optimization would be to schedule tasks (programs, OS services, various optimizers) efficiently. Meta-scheduler, if you will, would look at the run states and adjust priorities and time slices as needed.

With virtualization getting news coverage, being able to manage the individual partitions in automatic way would be nice, too.