[cap-talk] Butler Lampson's upcoming talk

[Tony Finch]

On Wed, Apr 9, 2008 at 8:00 AM, Winnie Cheng <wwcheng at mit.edu> wrote:
>
> 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.

This baffles me. In what sense has distributed computing failed? All
computing these days is distributed! The web is a distributed system,
Microsoft Windows domains are distributed systems. In what sense has RISC
failed? It informs all modern CPU design. How can the fate of parallel
computing be in doubt when all computers are parallel? As for formal
methods, perhaps he should take a look at some of the advanced type system
features that are at last becoming popular. And finally software re-use:
has he not heard of DLLs or shared objects? Has he not looked at CPAN?

Tony.
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