Looks like directed energy weapons are getting closer to deployment. Will Val Kilmer make popcorn from space?

New Scientist looks at the claims of a cynical futurist, who says that the rate of innovative change is slowing. I'm not sure that I buy that, but I don't buy Kurzweil's claims about a bright future of dazzling, mind boggling change either:

At the Acceleration Studies Foundation, a non-profit think tank in San Pedro, California, John Smart examines why technological change is progressing so fast. Looking at the growth of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, Smart agrees with Kurzweil that we are rocketing toward a technological "singularity" - a point sometime between 2040 and 2080 where change is so blindingly fast that we just can't predict where it will go.

We had an era like that, and it was the 19th century. Consider the period from 1815 to 1915 - from the close of the Napoleonic wars to the beginning of the first world war. The start of that period is the dawn of industrialization - prior to then, most people still lived lives of subsistence farming, and never traveled further than about 20 miles from home. By 1915 you had trains, electricity, home heating, machine guns, airplanes - it was a simply dizzying rate of change, and society (in the West, at least) wasn't entirely prepared for it. Those changes spawned many nasty political currents (fascism, communism).

The current era isn't really like that in one very large sense - there's an assumption of progress. People don't really expect things to stay the way they always have - the political shock of the French Revolution, and the technological shock of the Industrial Revolution shook early 19th century society violently, as people were suddenly faced with huge changes on all fronts. We aren't looking at that now, I don't think, even if nano-technology brings a level of unprecedented advancement. Why? Simple because of a greater acceptance and expectation of change.

I've come across an interesting call for papers from a post Java set of workshops. The very name of this event is interesting: 2nd Workshop on Object-Oriented Language Engineering for the Post-Java Era: Back to Dynamicity. It seems that the R&D community in software is starting to realize that Java - and C# - are the last signposts in a dead end area of software, not the heralds of a new way of doing things:

The advent of Java has always been perceived as a major breakthrough in the realm of object-oriented languages. And to some extent it was: it turned academic features like interfaces, garbage-collection and meta-programming into technologies generally accepted by industry. Nevertheless Java also acted as a brake especially to academic language design research. Whereas pre-Java Ecoop's and Oopsla's traditionally featured several tracks with a plethora of research results in language design, more recent versions of these conferences show far less of these. And those results that do make it to the proceedings very often are formulated as extensions of Java. Therefore they necessarily follow the Java-doctrine: statically typed single-inheritance class-based languages with interfaces and exception handling.

That's certainly been the case at OOPSLA the last few years - all Java, all the time - and pretty much none of it new. Instead, it's been a progression of things that had already been learned, but redone in Java. In that respect, the academic world has been echoing the goings on in IT shops during the late '90s bubble - things were redone in Java, and not for any really good reasons. The herd jumped that way, and everyone got behind the herd. Now, it would seem that two things have started to occur:

• IT shops have reconsidered large rewrites as a strategy (the budgets for such things have become very hard to justify)
• The academic world is waking up and realizing that there might be some value in looking elsewhere.

This is all very good news for those of us who have thought that Java represented a sideways step. Yes, the mainstreaming of VM technology and of garbage collection have been altogether good things - I no longer have people questioning their value. However, it's also meant the continuation of a very static approach to systems development. Look at web applications - nothing really new has been invented in that space except in the dynamic arena - Seaside and other continuation based web frameworks have come out of the dynamic language camp (Smalltalk, Scheme, Lisp) - not out of the Java or C# side of the house. All we get from there is masses of XML based "advances" (Struts) that represent a status quo solution to an existing problem. All the new thought is coming from the dynamic niche - which is exactly the sort of problem that people behind this workshop see:

Recent academic developments seem to indicate that a new generation of application domains is emerging for whose development the languages adhering to this doctrine will probably no longer be sufficient. These application domains have recently been grouped together under the name Ambient Intelligence (AmI). The visionary idea of AmI is that in the future, everybody will be surrounded by a dynamically defined processor cloud of which the applications are expected to cooperate smoothly. AmI was put forward as a major strategic research theme by the EU's IST Advisory Group for the 6th Framework of the EU. Meanwhile, the first european symposium on AmI has recently been organised and institutions like the MIT and Phillips have published their visions on the matter. Currently, AmI seems to group previously "unrelated" fields such as context dependency, domotics, ubiqutous computing, mobility, intelligent buildings and wearable hardware. Early experiments in these fields already seem to indicate that their full development will need a new generation of programming languages that have dedicated provisions to deal with highly dynamic hardware and software constellations. As such, AmI will open up a new "market" for a new generation of programming languages which are designed to write software that is expected to operate in extremely dynamic hardware and software configurations. In the past, lots of languages answering this profile have been investigated. Examples are Lisp, CLOS, Scheme, Self, Smalltalk and loads of less well-known academic languages. Give the new constellation outlined above, we believe there is a new future for languages like this. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers in object-oriented language design who adhere language features and languages that do not follow the current Java doctrine but adhere more "dynamic features".

Take a look at what's being said there - these folks believe that we need progress, and it's not going to come from the static side of the house. There's progress to be made, but doing so requires a more dynamic style of development than is possible in languages like Java. I have to say, it's nice to hear some validation of the sorts of things that we dynamic language advocates have been saying for years now. With any luck, OOPSLA will start being an interesting show again, instead of "Things we already knew how to do, but have applied to Java".

If you are interested in this from a research standpoint, then follow this link and get involved with the workshops.