Year end notes: As you can see from the submitted pictures, Duke is enjoying quite a vacation. » Read more

The End of the Beginning?: When we're no longer writing programs, do we still need programming languages? — Ron Hitchens

What's Richard Monson-Haefel up to in 2004?: For 2004, RMH is planning to write a paper and possibly a book on the J2SE, working on the JCP EC, JSR 220, and Geronimo, and consulting. — Richard Monson-Haefel

Sizeof for Java
In his JavaWorld article Sizeof for Java Vladimir Roubstov discusses why you might want an indication of an object's size. He also asks, " given that you usually deal with object graphs, what is the definition of an object size? Is it just the size of the object instance you're examining or the size of the entire data graph rooted at the object instance? The latter is what usually matters more in practice." He presents you with code examples for measuring an object's size.

Inappropriate Abstractions
Presenting the right abstraction is a balancing act. In a network application you don't want to pretend that remote objects are local and allow developers to ignore the cost of these calls. Anders Hejlsberg discusses some of these Inappropriate Abstractions with Bill Venners and Bruce Eckel. For the CORBA approach to networking, Hejlsberg says "The nirvana ideal was that you could just say Object obj = CreateMeAnObject(), and then call obj.ThisMethod(), obj.ThatMethod(), and you wouldn't know if that object was over in Thailand, right next door, or in the same process. The problem with that type of programming is: it works great in a single process; it works quite well across processes; it works fairly well in a small intranet; but then it completely sucks thereafter."