Sausage and Egg Burrito

Philip Wadler succeeded with the impossible, he made me by another Java book: Java Generics The talk was a historic talk about how Haskell came about and how the ideas from Haskell where later put into Java Generics. The highlight was when Philip Wadler described how “this is a case for lambda” and ripped of his shirt and showed his superman costume with a lambda instead of an S. The same techniques have also been put into links, a language for creating multi-tier web applications.

The onward track presented two papers: The Commensalistic Software System was a first try of implementing Dick Gabriels and Ron Goldmans Conscientious System_. This paper deals with Self-Healing and Self-Protection from Autonomic Computing.

Collaborative Diffusion: Programming Antiobjects was about reversing the responsibility between an object and its environment by letting the environment do things that are usually done by the object. Diffusion means spontaneous spreading. In this context it uses a function to calculate the relation between objects.

Martin Rinard talked of Minimizing Understanding in the Construction and Maintenance of Software Systems. This was probably the best presentation of the week. Martin said that there are three methods of reasoning about computer systems: Rationalism, empiricism, and cluelessness. Contrary to what you may think Martin suggested that selective cluelessness is the way to go. The reason for this is that we are always working at the edge of our cognitive understanding and if we want to build more complicated things we need to let go of our need of understanding everything. The common approach of searching for truth, elegance and understanding is to hard for the common programmer. The simple fact is that: Nobody understands a whole system! The way to get things done is by brute force instead of elegance because elegance takes to long. We have to plan to live with errors. Programs need to be acceptable not correct.

Martin and his team has implemented a compiler that ignores addressing errors, stops memory leaks by cyclic allocation and removes infinite loops by cutting them off after a specified number of iterations. They tested the compiler on Apache, sendmail, etc and they worked better than they did before without any noticeable errors. We need to give up correctness for robustness! Martin even went so far as to say that if a system must stay alive we should wrap all out call in try-catch-ignore clauses.