Manifest: Tuesday 17 April 2001

Thursday's class will be in Olsson 236D.

Assignments
Thursday, 19 April (in class)	Problem Set 4
24-26 April	Project Presentations
Tuesday, 1 May	Project Report

Links

• Yale Linda Group
• IBM Almaden's TSpaces
• JavaSpaces Principles, Patterns, and Practice
• David Gelernter, Mirror Worlds : Or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox : How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean.

Questions

• What are some popular abstractions for concurrency?
• What are the advantages of decoupling parallel processes?
• What are tuple spaces?
• How to write and understand a Linda-style program.

Dr. Gelernter:

People with advanced degrees aren't as smart as they think they are. If you'd had any brains you would have realized that there are a lot of people out there who resent bitterly the way techno-nerds like you are changing the world and you wouldn't have been dumb enough to open an unexpected package from an unknown source.

In the epilog of your book, "Mirror Worlds," you tried to justify your research by claiming that the developments you describe are inevitable, and that any college person can learn enough about computers to compete in a computer-dominated world. Apparently, people without a college degree don't count. In any case, being informed about computers won't enable anyone to prevent invasion of privacy (through computers), genetic engineering (to which computers make an important contribution), environmental degradation through excessive economic growth (computers make an important contribution to economic growth) and so forth.

As for the inevitability argument, if the developments you describe are inevitable, they are not inevitable in the way that old age and bad weather are inevitable. They are inevitable only because techno-nerds like you make them inevitable. If there wereno computer scientists there would be no progress in computerscience. If you claim you are justified in pursuing your research because the developments involved are inevitable, then you may as well say that theft is inevitable, therefore we shouldn't blame thieves.

But we do not believe that progress and growth are inevitable.

We'll have more to say about that later.

Letter from the Unabomber to David Gelernter, April 1995 (two years after sending him a bomb)

I couldn't care less what the man's views on technology are or what message he intended to deliver; the message I got was that in any society, no matter how rich, just and free, you can rely on there being a certain number of evil cowards. I thank him for passing it along, but I knew that anyway. ... The bright side, so to speak, of grave injury, discomfort and nearness to death is that you emerge with a clear fix on what the heart treasures. Mostly I didn't learn anything new but had the satisfaction of having my hunches confirmed. I emerged knowing that, as I had always suspected, the time I spend with my wife and boys is all that matters in the end.

David Gelernter in Time magazine after Kaczynski's arrest, April 1996.

University of Virginia Department of Computer Science CS 655: Programming Languages

David Evans evans@virginia.edu