Building a Fortress
Posted Mon, 23 Jan 2006 09:48:00 GMT
Guy Steele is clearly one of the people who is shaping today's computing science. He co-wrote the Java spec and is presently leading the team working on the future Fortress programming language.
This article - http://research.sun.com/minds/2005-0302/ on Sun's site is about him.
I don't know the guy, but by reading this article a few features of his character really stand out for me:
- Takes nothing for granted
- He's very thorough
- Knows how to sell
Now these skills, or characteristics are on very different levels. It's no good being a brilliant technician if you don't know how to trick people into buying your very clever stuff. It's no good being a sleek salesman if you have rubbish to sell. It clearly takes a lot of digging if you want to change the world for the better
Anyway, on the subject of Fortress, it looks great and other than the target audience at first glance I really don't see any big similarities with Fortran. So I'm joining the mailing list.... It's here: http://www.experimentalstuff.com/mailman/listinfo/fortress-interest.
The Fortress spec and other resources can be found on Sun's Programming Language Research web site, here - http://research.sun.com/projects/plrg/
