Jonathan Edwards: Programming Futures and Declarative Objects

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<img src="http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/ch9/3930/563930/C9ConversationsJonathanEdwards_85_ch9.png" border="0" />"The biggest problem with programming is that we don’t agree on what the problem is", says http://subtextual.org/AboutMe.htm" target="_blank Jonathan Edwards , who is first and foremost a practicing programmer. Jonathan also spends a great deal of time thinking about how to evolve the languages and tools programmers use to solve increasingly complex problems in general purpose computing. He is currently a Research fellow at MIT, and I caught up with him at  http://emerginglangs.com/" target="_blank Emerging Languages Camp 2010 shortly after his talk on Declarative Objects (see the  http://coherence-lang.org/EmergingLangs.ppt" target="_blank PPT or  http://coherence-lang.org/EmergingLangs.pdf" target="_blank PDF slides). His thoughts on a potential future direction for general-purpose programming are quite compelling. In a nutshell, Jonathan is thinking about an object-oriented model-view declarative programming world. Discussing this idea, he states, "First, restrict pointers with a new object model that uses nesting and binding. Second, prevent cycles with a new form of dataflow based on the Model-View architecture."

Look through the PPT or PDF linked to above, press play, and open your mind a bit. See what you may see. The programming languages rabbit hole is deep. We seem to be hovering at a comfortable position, yet the problems we face will require us to move further down the tunnel to discover new means of algorithmic expression and code design. Jump in.

Enjoy.<img src="http://channel9.msdn.com/563930/WebViewBug.aspx?EVT=0" height="1" width="1" alt="" />

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