OOPSLA 2009 - Videocast 4 - Microsoft Technology update with Dr. Erik Meijer of Microsoft

Dr. Erik Meijer is well know in language communities (and language lawyer circles) to have help create C# and LINQ (Language Integrated Query). He’s a frequent presenter at OOPSLA on these technologies as well as one of the early voices encouraging the merging of functional and object-oriented technologies and techniques.

In a brief telephone interview, Erik gives us a thorough update on what is new with C# and visual basic, the .NET platform, LINQ, and other up coming technologies at Microsoft (e.g., Project M and Azure).



Interestingly he mentions how some of of his early efforts on combining functional and object-oriented programming are surfacing to address multicore issues as well as how LINQ is finding various applications to solve parallel programming data issues and how LINQp and reactive LINQ are being used by Microsoft in their cloud platform environments: Azure and SQL Azure.

Finally, Erik finishes this video-podcast discussing what OOPSLA means to him, some of his colleagues at Microsoft, and also gives us a flavor of the strong presence of Microsoft technologies and presenters at OOPSLA this year.

OOPSLA 2009 - Videocast 3 - Cloud Analytics with Dr. Anant Jhingran of IBM

Anant Jhingran is well known for leading the technology direction of IBM’s information management division---which includes DB2, Informix, Cloudscape, and Cognos, to name a few. One of the important aspect of any information management portfolio is its analytics capabilities. Nowadays with companies collecting vast amount of data from their Web properties from end users of via social media sites, an obvious growth area for information management users and vendors is to facilitate fast and appropriate insights from this ever increasing big collection of data. Business Intelligence is not a new field, however, the opportunity to apply such technology has never been more pervasive and for so much and so varied domains and in many ways have never been more challenging...



In this videocast I caught up with Dr. Jhingran at his offices in IBM Silicon Valley Labs to discuss business analytics in a cloud computing world. That is, what is the impact of the cloud on big data? His explanation boils down to a simple equation of pain vs. gain. Dr. Jhingran also discusses how programming-oriented conferences such as OOPSLA have a lot to contribute to the challenges of analyzing big data when companies attempt to extract knowledge. The need for programming tricks and tools go beyond map reduce to scalable data analytics languages with well understood semantics and characteristics as SQL was for relational databases.

OOPSLA 2009 - Videocast 2 - Social Software with Patrick Chanezon of Google, Inc.

As we discussed in one of the previous OOPSLA 2009 blog post social software continues to impact modern lives in ways the inventors or users of the technologies are uncovering daily. By empowering everyone to be a “journalist” and a “broadcaster”, social media and associated tools are enabling everyone, everywhere, to have a voice and thus is encouraging democratic virtues to flow in all regions of the world. We are seeing only the beginning of this social media revolution.



In this videocast I caught up, at Google IO 2009 in San Francisco, with Patrick Chanezon: one of Google’s most outspoken evangelists on Social Media and Software. Patrick corroborates the importance and wide ranging impact of Social Media and Software. He also talks about Google’s effort to create an open social platform and the successes they have been able to achieve thus far. Importantly, Patrick explains why HTML, JavaScript, and Web APIs in conjunction with platforms like Youtube, Facebook, and Twitter have enabled a new style of Web programming which in turn has facilitated viral sharing of Web content to create this new social Web fabric where content flows in real time without national borders.

Patrick ends the videocast by discussing why OOPSLA matters to Google and how Googlers view deep computer science conferences such as OOPSLA.