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“Fundamentally flawed”

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 ;)