[cap-talk] Butler Lampson's upcoming talk

[Jed Donnelley]

At 08:00 AM 4/9/2008, Winnie Cheng wrote:
>Hi,
>
>For those in the area, this upcoming talk may be of interest.
>
>Winnie
>--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>Speaker: Butler Lampson
>Date: 4-17-2008
>Location: MIT Room 54-100
>
>Gold and Fool's Gold: Successes, Failures, and Futures in Computer
>
>...Other promising ideas have not worked out: capabilities, distributed
>computing, RISC, and persistent objects. And the fate of some is still
>in doubt: parallel computing, formal methods, and software reuse. The
>Web was not invented by computer systems researchers. In the light of
>all this experience, what will be exciting to work on in the next few years?

Ha!  I wish I could be there.  I love the way he turns opinion
into "experience".

OK, I know his opinion on capabilities and I can see why his 'experience'
suggests they didn't work out.  He also puts "distributed computing"
into that category?

I'd be quite interested to hear his story on persistent objects
(independent of capabilities).

Also he questions parallel computing?  How odd.  We have so many
scientific computing systems with 10s to 100s of thousands of
processors seemingly quite "successfully" churning out modeling
results with no apparent alternative at present and Butler questions
whether parallel processing is gold or fool's gold?  I wonder if
he's questioning the non determinism aspects of current systems?

Is anybody going to be able to make the presentation?  Winnie?

Will we be able to get a chart set?  Audio?  I would love to hear
his arguments - though I guess not for me to take up on cap-talk ;-)
I guess if Butler keeps taking more and more radical positions
perhaps it will be easier to paint him as outside the "mainstream".

Thanks for the note!

--Jed  http://www.webstart.com/jed-signature.html