The Eclectic Technologist

I returned from EclipseCon 2006 with renewed respect for the many developers all over the world that are contributing to the Eclipse platform. Sure, there’s a lot of open source software out there, but Eclipse stands alone in terms of quality and imagination.

I chatted briefly with Todd Nielson, CEO of Borland. He had some interesting comments on the direction of software and the role of open source. Todd was with Microsoft for many years and confirmed that Microsoft has only two profitable products: Office and Windows. All others lose money or break even. SQL server might make a little money, though. This curious fact explains a lot of Microsofts business strategy.

I also interviewed Ward Cunningham, which was a lot of fun. The complete podcast of the interview is available on SQLSummit.com. After the interview, we chatted for an hour or more. We talked about all kinds of things, much of which revolved around novel applications for Atmel AVR microcontrollers. The most interesting thing I learned was the idea of trying many ideas quickly. This seems to be central to Wards thinking.

Over the weekend, I happened to run across the guts of a turbine from an Auxilliary Power Unit (APU). Upon closer inspection, I noticed chipped blades on the output wheel. The owner admitted that when he first started it up, he introduced fuel at low RPM. It ran, but several hot chips flew out of the exhaust. He shut it down and then learned of the catastrophic damage. “It was an expensive lesson” went the apology.

I’ve flown turbine helicopters on several occastions, but I never started them myself. The owner/operators were very concerned about hot starts. After seeing the potential damage first hand, I don’t blame them.

Anyone familiar with Smalltalk or the work of Xerox PARC between 1970 and 1980 has heard of Alan Kay. Kay has to be one of the greatest minds and greatest contributors to modern technology in our time.

My recent interest in Smalltalk lead me to a video presentation by Alan Kay in 1987. That time seems like the plasticine era, just as Kay remarked about the 1960s. The video, “Doing with Images Makes Symbols”, highlights the developments of early CAD systems, origins of object oriented programming, human interface devices, and culminates with absolutely fantastic developments at Xerox PARC. Kays quips about the state of technology in 1987 underscores the monumental gap between research and commercialization, something that is just as true today.

I strongly encourage anyone with any interest in technology to watch this video. The streaming version is of low quality, so I would suggest downloading the entire 256 kb MPEG4 file and viewing offline. It’s about 120 MB and runs 40 minutes or so.

There is a second part to this video, which is slightly longer, and includes several examples of interdisciplinary learning applied to computer interface design. If you have every wanted to learn to play tennis, this is a quick introduction! Further, interviews with Alan Kay expose key ideas, such as the importance of the aesthetic in almost any field, particularly science and engineering.

After watching this video, I can’t help but wonder if Steve Jobs was heavily influenced by Alan Kay and his ideas. Clearly the aesthetic has been central to the Macintosh and more recently the wildly succesful iPod.

In second grade we had a model of the solar system, of course, it wasn’t to scale. One student asked which planet representent the Earth, I quickly pointed and said it was the third one from the Sun. Another student didn’t agree and confidently claimed it must be the biggest one because the Earth is so big.

It was clear to me that I wasn’t going to win this argument, so I suggested we ask the teacher. We explained each of our positions and asked for authoritative confirmation. The teacher looked bewildered, almost sad and said “I really don’t know”. I knew I was right because my brother and my father followed the space program closely in those days.

What was worse: no other student could identify the Earth, the teacher herself didn’t know, or that no one was willing to look it up in an established reference?

I just ran into this prediction of Smalltalk adoption:

“The latest figures I’ve heard are that Smalltalk has between 15% and 25% of the entire OO market, but is growing at about 60% per year, while C++ is only growing at about 30% per year. If these trends continue (of course, they never *exactly* do), Smalltalk should overtake C++ by the end of the century!” 

This was posted to comp.lang.smalltalk on May 11, 1995. Last time I checked, the 20th century ended, C++ was still going strong and Smalltalk was blindsided by Java. What does that say about future predictions?