Bonjour,

Je voudrais porter à votre attention le texte ci-dessous, extrait d'un article ACM bien intéressant (et très récent; oct. 2005). Si vous souhaitez avoir une copie au format PDF de l'article (~3 M°), n'hésitez pas à me faire signe.

Je vous souhaite un bon réveillon et une excellente année 2006,
Cordialement,
RR

Extrait sur Smalltalk (page 40/47):
Tim Lindholm is a Distinguished Engineer for the Java Software group at Sun Microsystems. He was an original member of the Java project at Sun and remains the architect of the Java virtual machine.

5. If you were to design a programming language today, how would it differ from current programming languages? I am leery of object-orientation as a kind of religion that drags in complexity in the guise of simplicity. It bugs me that sometimes to use an object system requires mind-twisting discussions on what things mean. Real programmers don't have time for religious arguments. Nonetheless I would like to see the world take another run at a Smalltalk-like language, something simpler than current popular languages. Java was striving for elegance and simplicity while retaining familiarity and usability. For example, Gosling went against the grain, and refused to put stuff into Java, such as operator overloading, which makes the language harder to learn and makes it easier to make mistakes in programming. Now that the world is more comfortable with garbage collection, threads, and virtual machines, it would be desirable to try another programming language (like Smalltalk) where more cleanliness and elegance are embodied.

Réf. ACM: Ryder, B. G., Soffa, M. L., and Burnett, M. 2005. The impact of software engineering research on modern progamming languages. ACM Trans. Softw. Eng. Methodol. 14, 4 (Oct. 2005), 431-477. DOI= http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1101815.1101818

Titre: The Impact of Software Engineering Research on Modern Progamming Languages

Résumé: Software engineering research and programming language design have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship, with traceable impacts since the 1970s, when these areas were first distinguished from one another. This report documents this relationship by focusing on several major features of current programming languages: data and procedural abstraction, types, concurrency, exceptions, and visual programming mechanisms. The influences are determined by tracing references in publications in both fields, obtaining oral histories from language designers delineating influences on them, and tracking cotemporal research trends and ideas as demonstrated by workshop topics, special issue publications, and invited talks in the two fields. In some cases there is conclusive data supporting influence. In other cases, there are circumstantial arguments (i.e., cotemporal ideas) that indicate influence. Using this approach, this study provides evidence of the impact of software engineering research on modern programming language design and documents the close relationship between these two fields.