Eliot Miranda, Smalltalk VM Expert

Elliot is a loooong-time Smalltalk VM implementor and systems programmer having written his first VM in 1983. He was lucky enough to work on Peter Deutsch’s HPS VM for VisualWorks throughout the 90′s and early 2000′s and essentially double its speed (mostly by adding polymorphic inline caches and rearchitecting its mapping of contexts to stacks). Elliot was technical lead for VisualWorks from vw 3.0 through vw 7.4.1, leaving at the and of 2006. Amongst other things Elliot has invented method pragmas/method tags as seen in VisualWorks and Squeak. Elliot spent an all too brief but stimulating time at Cadence in Gilad Bracha’s Newspeak team, and then went to Teleplace (née Qwaq) where he was free to implement another fast VM for Croquet, a 3d immersive collaboration architecture built above Squeak Smalltalk, but this time (unlike VisualWorks) the VM is open source. Elliot returned to Cadence early in 2011 where he is working for Yaron Kashai on system-on-a-chip design support in Newspeak running above the Cog VM.

Presentation: "Objects On Trial"

Time: Wednesday 09:20 - 10:20

Location: Metropolitan Ballroom

Abstract: It’s been a quarter of a century since objects really arrived on the software scene, with great fanfare, lofty expectations, and more than a little hype. One can argue, and there are those who do, that objects have won. That their triumph is complete. That object-oriented programming has become, well, programming. And yet, the case can be made that this “victory” has come at a cost that must be measured against the conceptual complexity these highbrow languages have brought with them, the architectural Balkanization and “Trail of Tiers” they have wrought, and the impedance mismatches that have resulted from the Babel of languages that O-O has spawned, and its defeat in the data tier.

Have objects met the transformative promises made for them a generation ago? Or have they done more harm than good?

The time has come to put them on trial. We’ll remand objects themselves to the dock, and hear from a panel of distinguished, expert witnesses for the prosecution and the defense, before letting the You, the Jury, decide their fate.