Killer presentation — "RPC And Its Offspring: Convenient, Yet Fundamentally Flawed" from Steve Vinoski, who presented it at QCon London last week. It’s full of reminders of the mid-90’s, hacking away on CORBA technology — Steve was one of the key players at Iona while I was there.
But never mind where we’ve been; let me hit you with the summary slide to show where Steve’s going:
RPC is a convenient but flawed accident of history
- 1980s research focused on monoliths of programming languages, distributed applications, and operating systems
- each computer vendor of the time owned their own full stack, from language to hardware and network, and you used what they gave you
- imperative languages won back then simply because of their superior performance at that time
It’s almost 2010, folks — we can do WAY better
- pull your head from the imperative language sand and learn functional programming
- the world is many-core and highly distributed, and the old ways aren’t going to keep working much longer
Awesome ;)