I’m working my way through the videos from the Lightweight Languages 2002 (LL2) conference at MIT. Yay, for digital videos of conferences! Boo, for doing it in RealVideo format. This isn’t just because I can’t archive it locally, but also because there isn’t terribly much action to watch. Most of the time, the camera focuses on the presenter’s slides, which appear blurry and pixelated after the RealVideo codec has squished them. I look forward to the day when SMIL or some other integrated multimedia solution allows us to mix audio/text/html/pdf/video in a syncronized stream. It would be a great boost for online learning.
Anyhow, I’ve just watched Matthew Flatt’s presentation in which he plays with the distinction between programming languages and operating systems. He makes the point that safe languages (such as ml, where the type system guarantees that you won’t suffer pointer errors) remove at least some of the reasons for having processes occupying seperate address spaces. Unlike in C++, an ML program will never scribble over the end of a heap block. So, if your citizens are well enough behaved, they can all live in the one house together.
Hmm, must leave to get to band practise now …