Monday, July 11, 2005

Free Expression of Ideas

* Even if you think you can beat Waldo, you can't beat Einstein "For example to ping a peer on my local wireless network the best latency (as measured by running batch of pings) is around 2ms but my average latency is 100ms over a negligible distance compared to the speed of light. In the average case on this network the binary protocol is a mere 14% faster than SOAP - certainly not tens of times faster."
* Speed of Light Fallacy "If you consider these numbers, you will see that the speed-of-light argument is a fallacy. Dealing with the speed-of-light limitation is achieved by minimizing the number of messages that are exchanged, and by maximizing the amount of data sent with each message, regardless of the transfer technology."
* Generics Considered Harmful "The complexity of Java has been turbocharged to what seems to me relatively small benefit. I don't see that the value is there to justify the cost. Not that we can change things, but I think we should at least view it as an demonstration proof of the value of an explicit complexity budget against which features must be justified. Without such a budget, it feels like the JSR process ran far ahead, without a step back to ask “Is this feature really necessary”. It seemed to just be understood that it was necessary."
* Generics Considered Harmful? Nope. "For a few library designers, who now want to create generic types (they still have the option of creating old style types), life just got more complicated. However, for all their clients, life got easier. Easier is good."

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