Today we learned about the analogies between garbage collection and transactional memory. The similarities are astonishing.
I wonder why transactional memory did not found its way into the main stream programming languages yet. The research is very active and already seemed to have laid out a strong theoretic foundation. There are even solutions to handle irreversible external state changes in atomic sections.
I can not wait for the first official implementation in C# :)
Another panel was about what a silver bullet in software development essentially is. In this panel, very big names were present. The ones I knew most, were Fred Brooks and Martin Fowler. Later, Martin sidestepped and put on a Werewolf mask (yes, in real!) to represent a distant external view on the software development community. Under his mask he actually was able to confront us with the software tragedy and some of the actual problems thereof.
In the end, Mr. Brooks – though he was not active the software development since 10 years – said, that he has never observed an engineering community that puts so much time in learning from its history.
Well, I would say, we would not if we wouldn’t forced to.
yours
armin