In this interview Joe Armstrong and Robert Virding, co-inventors of the Erlang language, talk about the future of the language, including its use in web programming, its ability to scale and more. The duo also discuss Erlang support for NoSQL databases, running the language on the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and comparisons with other languages such as Google’s Go.
Beside C/C++, Google Native Client has added support for runtimes such as Mono, and a richer set of Pepper interfaces: accelerated 3D, full-screen, File IO, debugging, and others. New languages -Lua, TCL, OCaml- are being ported, and several major producers have ported their game engines or their games to NaCl.
Google Native Client has been included in Chrome 14 Beta, on its way to become a technology supported in production.
Javascript's ubiquity and increasingly fast VMs have made it an interesting runtime for languages. InfoQ looks at languages and tools that compile to Javascript: CoffeeScript 1.0, StratifiedJS, the Emscripten LLVM backend which brings C/C++ to Javascript, and more.
The problems faced by teams that are attempting Agile in non-traditional settings aren't that Agile principles are inapplicable, nor that the feedback cycle is doomed to failure; but rather, outside of a certain Agile sweet-spot there are additional barriers and costs to applying Agile techniques. None of these obstacles prevents Agile in itself but each increases the cost of getting to Agile.
Cliff Moon explains how to make Erlang programs faster by writing performance critical sections of the code in C using Native Implemented Function and by integrating libraries using the linked-in driver interface. He also shows how to safely use C drivers in the Erlang concurrent environment and how to debug them in a running VM.
In this interview, Google’s Josh Bloch shares his views on the open-source Java landscape as well as on the future of the Java language, including changes being implemented via Project Coin. Bloch also discusses support for multi-core in programming languages, support for multiple languages on the JVM, Java pain points and the “next big language.”
Functional programming experts Simon Thompson and John Hughes discuss functional programming in today’s computing environments, particularly through the use of the Erlang and Haskell languages. In addition to debating the intricacies of both languages and their similarities and differences, Thompson and Hughes also discuss the growing popularity and maturity if functional programming.
Ralph Johnson and Joe Armstrong discuss the state of OOP, what Smalltalk got right/wrong and the image concept. Also: Joe decides he likes OOP as long as its done the Erlang way: focused on messaging.
