
Call with David Ungar (2015) [video] - mpweiher
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nfrC-YLYqc
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DonHopkins
Can somebody with a lot of money please regularly give a bunch of it to Dave
Ungar, so he can keep doing what he wants to do? He has generated so much
value on so many levels, that's so important and useful to millions of people
and companies on a daily basis.

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DonHopkins
I wrote this in 2006 (a couple years before V8):

I just ran into Dave Ungar (of Self fame), and mentioned how ironic it was
that JavaScript pointed to Self as its inspirational prototype (vis-a-vis
JavaScript's prototype based object system), but JavaScript totally missed the
boat on efficient compile-ability, which is the most interesting thing about
Self. (I mean, anybody can make a prototype oop system that runs slow, but it
takes a fucking genius to come up all the brilliant stuff in Self, like the
aggressive inlining compiler (it has no byte code interpreter, just a bad-ass
compiler), incremental compilation, polymorphic inline cache, coupled with
dynamic de-optimization to make it debuggable). He gave a cool Self demo of
writing a straightforward factorial function, then editing the source to the
system's multiplication operator, so it would return a different result if you
multiplied something by 1,000,000. Then he showed how it affected the
factorial function, as well as the rest of the system, which incrementally
recompiled itself as needed. All that and perfect debuggability, too! About
JavaScript, he retorted that it was actually possible to efficiently compile
JavaScript if you were really devious enough. Too bad the art of designing
languages so you don't have to be devious in order to compile them, was lost
of so many popular bad language designers (PHP, JavaScript, Perl, etc).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_(JavaScript_engine)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V8_\(JavaScript_engine\))

~~~
jecel
And after that one of Dave's ex-students put the Self technology into
Javascript (V8). So you were right.

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DonHopkins
A Conversation with Bjarne Stroustrup, Carl Hewitt, and Dave Ungar

They have a fascinating (and polite, respectful) argument about shared memory,
message passing, locks, synchronization, and lock free message passing!

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation-
with-...](https://channel9.msdn.com/Blogs/Charles/A-Conversation-with-Bjarne-
Stroustrup-Carl-Hewitt-and-Dave-Ungar)

What happens when you put three titans of programming language design and
computing in a room and turn a camera on to capture what takes place?

That's the thought experiment that led to this conversation with C++ language
creator Bjarne Stroustrup, Self language creator Dave Ungar, and actor model
creator Carl Hewitt. Thank goodness all three of them were present at
Lang.NEXT 2014. Many topics are covered, as you can imagine. It's best that
you find some quality time to watch, listen, and learn from some true masters.
This is a long conversation and there is great programming history herein!

This is a rare (and very candid) gathering of some of the best minds in the
programming world today.

Huge thanks to Bjarne, Carl, and Dave for spending over an hour to make
conversation in real time. The topics naturally evolved out of the random and
it was an honor to be in the room with such wonderful people who've had such a
huge impact on programming.

Tune in. Enjoy.

