Does the world need another programming language?

Rob Pike on how and why Google's new Go language was developed.

Rob Pike has certainly been places and done things. In the early 1980s, he worked with Brian Kernighan and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs, where he co-wrote "The Unix Programming Environment" with Kernighan and co-developed the UTF-8 character encoding standard with Thompson. Pike is now a principal engineer at Google, where he's co-developed Go, a new programming language. Pike, who will discuss Go at next month's OSCON convention, talks about Go's development and the current state of programming languages in the following interview.

What were the motivations for creating Go?

Rob Pike: A couple of years ago, several of us at Google became a little frustrated with the software development process, and particularly using C++ to write large server software. We found that the binaries tended to be much too big. They took too long to compile. And the language itself, which is pretty much the main system software language in the world right now, is a very old language. A lot of the ideas and changes in hardware that have come about in the last couple of decades haven't had a chance to influence C++. So we sat down with a clean sheet of paper and tried to design a language that would solve the problems that we have: we need to build software quickly, have it run well on modern multi-core hardware and in a network environment, and be a pleasure to use.

Although we targeted Go for a particular kind of problem, it turned out to be a much more general and adaptable programming language than we had thought. So we're using it for a lot of different things now. I think it might have an interesting future in any number of directions.

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Four short links: 22 June 2010

Fast Scans, Touch Screens, Privacy Newspeak, and Open Source Fonts

1. High-Speed Book Scanner -- you flip the pages, and it uses high-speed photography to capture images of each page. "But they're all curved!" Indeed, so they project a grid onto the page so as to be able to correct for the curvature. The creator wanted to scan Manga, but the first publisher he tried turned him down. I've written to him offering a pile of O'Reilly books to test on. We love this technology!
2. Magic Tables, not Magic Windows (Matt Jones) -- thoughtful piece about how touch-screens are rarely used as a controller of abstract things rather than of real things, with some examples of the potential he's talking about. When we’re not concentrating on our marbles, we’re looking each other in the eye - chuckling, tutting and cursing our aim - and each other. There’s no screen between us, there’s a magic table making us laugh. It’s probably my favourite app to show off the iPad - including the ones we’ve designed! It shows that the iPad can be a media surface to share, rather than a proscenium to consume through alone.
3. Myths and Fallacies of Personally Identifiable Information -- particularly relevant after reading Apple's new iTunes privacy policy. We talk about the technical and legal meanings of “personally identifiable information” (PII) and argue that the term means next to nothing and must be greatly de-emphasized, if not abandoned, in order to have a meaningful discourse on data privacy. (via Pete Warden)
4. Mensch Font -- an interesting font, but this particularly caught my eye: Naturally I searched for a font editor, and the best one I found was Font Forge, an old Linux app ported to the Mac but still requiring X11. So that’s two ways OS X is borrowing from Linux for font support. What’s up with that? Was there an elite cadre of fontistas working on Linux machines in a secret bunker? Linux is, um, not usually known for its great designers. (via joshua on Delicious)

On the performance of clouds

A study ran cloud providers through four tests. Here's some of the results.

Public clouds are based on the economics of sharing. Cloud providers can charge less, and sell computing on an hourly basis without long-term contracts, because they're spreading costs and skills across many customers.

But a shared model means that your application is competing with other users' applications for scarce resources. The pact you're making with a public cloud, for better or worse, is that the advantages of elasticity and pay-as-you-go economics outweigh any problems you'll face.

Enterprises are skeptical because clouds force them to relinquish control over the underlying networks and architectures on which their applications run. Is performance acceptable? Will clouds be reliable? What's the tradeoff, particularly now that we know speed matters so much?

We (Bitcurrent) decided to find out. With the help of Webmetrics, we built four test applications: a small object, a large object, a million calculations, and a 500,000-row table scan. We ported the applications to five different clouds, and monitored them for a month. We discovered that performance varies widely by test type and cloud:

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Giving patient data meaningful use

NHIN Direct's Arien Malec on open community and data exchange standards.

Arien Malec is coordinator of NHIN Direct, a new open-source effort sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to improve health care through the secure exchange of patient data. Malec, a speaker in the health track at next month's OSCON conference, has led a uniquely open, community-based project to define standards for NHIN Direct.

In this 27-minute audio interview, Malec talks about:

• Why privacy concerns make communication standards in health care more difficult than e-commerce.
• The difficulties doctors face when trying to send data needed to treat patients.
• The learning process HHS went through in deciding NHIN Direct was needed, as well as the steps it took to develop standards in the Internet's "rough consensus and running code" fashion.
• The kinds of applications and services that should be facilitated by NHIN Direct.

Arien Malec will discuss the collaboration and framework that made NHIH Direct possible at the OSCON convention (running July 19-23 in Portland, Ore.). Learn more about OSCON's new health track.

Four short links: 21 June 2010

Internet Explained, Crowdsourced TV, PHP Visualisation, Google Shell

1. Law of Success 2.0 -- a blog of interviews with famous and/or interesting people, from Brad Feld to Uri Geller.
2. Pioneer One -- crowdsourced funding for TV show, perhaps a hint of the future. Pilot shot for $6,000 which was raised through KickStarter. Distributed via BitTorrent.
3. DrasticTools -- PHP/MySQL visualisation tools, including TreeMap, tag cloud, hierarchical bar chart, and animated list. (via TomC on Delicious)
4. GoogleCL -- command-line interface to Google services. At the moment the services are Picasa, Blogger, YouTube, Contacts, Docs, and Calendar.

Gov 2.0 Week in Review

Supreme Court ruling on privacy in the workplace, Gov 2.0 Hero Day, responding to the BP oil spill, Knight Foundation Winners and a "Do Not Pay" list

This week's review comes as the nation comes to grips with the expanding scope of its worst environmental disaster in living memory, as the extent of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico becomes more clear. Despite the dire circumstances, the fact that I was able to stream President Barack Obama's first address to the nation from the Oval Office using the White House app on my iPhone as I walked home was a reminder of new ways government can use technology to share information. When I arrived home, I was able to stream the rest of the speech from WhiteHouse.gov/live, coupled with real-time press reaction on Twitter. And after the speech, I watched a real-time YouTube question and answer session with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and White House new media director Macon Phillips.

While livestreamed speeches and online forums will do nothing to stop oil gushing from a mile below the Gulf's surface, nor protect the livelihood of those who live around it, the role of new media, open data and technology platforms in the response to the spill is notable. The use of social media in the oil spill response has been extensive, as examples listed on a post on GovLoop shows. That's critical, given new government estimates of the flow rate of the oil spill are now between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels per day. At 42 gallons per barrel, that puts the oil flow between 1.4 million and 2.52 million gallons of oil per day.

Whether the oil spill response team is using Facebook, leveraging the technical resources at Google's oil spill crisis response page or using NOAA's new GIS tool to map the response of the spill, technology is being used in unprecedented ways to address an extraordinary threat.

More on the week past in Gov 2.0 news after the jump, including government work places privacy, a "do not pay list," Law.gov, Digital Capitol Week, Knight News Challenge winners, Gov 2.0 Hero Day and more.

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Four short links: 18 June 2010

Facebook Scraping, Law Code, AppEngine in Javascript, and Flash Visualization

1. Facebook Changes Crawling Policy (for the better) -- they're implementing their crawling policy in robots.txt and not in additional contractual terms. This is in response to Pete Warden pointing out that robots.txt is industry standard and will avoid confusion such as landed him with large lawyer bills. This change came from Bret Taylor, their CTO, who was product manager for Google Maps and gets working sanely with developers. (via Pete Warden)
2. Law as Source Code (Sean McGrath) -- there's something important coming together in his series of blog posts about law. What we have here are two communities that work with insanely large, complex corpora of text that must be rigorously managed and changed with the utmost care, precision and transparency of intent. Yet, the software community has a much greater set of tools at its disposal to help out.
3. AppEngineJS -- a port of the Google Appengine Python SDK to JavaScript [...] JavaScript Web applications powered by Google's infrastructure [...] at client and server side.
4. Axiis -- Flash-based visualization framework.

Visualizing the Senate social graph, revisited

How the addition of animation and interactivity improved a visualization.

"Beautiful Visualization" releases in print next week. In putting together the book, Julie Steele and Noah Iliinsky asked a range of visualization experts like Nick Bilton, Fernanda Viega and Martin Wattenberg, as well as enthusiasts (like me), to critique a visualization they'd created.

My chapter, which was inspired by Chris Wilson's article The Senate Social Network, uses graph visualization and data from govtrack.us to show how voting patterns in the U.S. Senate have evolved since 1991. For example, one of the most stark revelations in the visualization is the way that cross-party voting (as Wilson defined it, which was when two Senators voted together across a session over 65% of the time) completely disappears during the 104th session (the period of the so called "Republican Revolution").

While this isn't exactly unexpected, it was fascinating to see how clearly these events are reflected in the visualization. The structure of the graph went from a fairly oblong shape with many cross connections between parties to two completely separate, tight party clusters. This Ignite presentation describes the key findings in more detail:

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From Apache to Health and Human Services

Apache co-founder Brian Behlendorf discusses the CONNECT health data project.

Brian Behlendorf, one of the founders of the Apache web server project and the CollabNet cooperative software development company, is contracting now with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) on the CONNECT software project. CONNECT helps hospitals and agencies exchange medical data, which gives doctors critical information to improve patient care.

Behlendorf, along with project leader David Riley, will speak at OSCON about the importance of CONNECT and the way they and their colleagues built a robust community of government staff, volunteers, and healthcare IT vendors around it.

Behlendorf discusses the following in this 18-minute podcast:

• The role of health data in promoting quality care, in improving our knowledge of what works, and in reducing healthcare costs.
• How HHS is trying to improve the exchange of patient data for hospitals and doctors, agencies monitoring quality of care, and eventually patients themselves.
• How, with Behlendorf's help, HHS opened up the CONNECT project, attracted both volunteers and vendors to improve it, and created a community with a sense of ownership.

Four short links: 17 June 2010

Statistical Jeopardy Wins, Mobile Taxonomy, Geodata Mystery, and Machine Learning Blog

1. What is IBM's Watson? (NY Times) -- IBM joining the big data machine learning race, and hatching a Blue Gene system that can answer Jeopardy questions. Does good, not great, and is getting better.
2. Google Lays Out its Mobile Strategy (InformationWeek) -- notable to me for Rechis said that Google breaks down mobile users into three behavior groups: A. "Repetitive now" B. "Bored now" C. "Urgent now", a useful way to look at it. (via Tim)
3. BP GIS and the Mysteriously Vanishing Letter -- intrigue in the geodata world. This post makes it sound as though cleanup data is going into a box behind BP's firewall, and the folks who said "um, the government should be the depot, because it needs to know it has a guaranteed-untampered and guaranteed-able-to-access copy of this data" were fired. For more info, including on the data that is available, see the geowanking thread.
4. Streamhacker -- a blog talking about text mining and other good things, with nltk code you can run. (via heraldxchaos on Delicious)

NASA technology leads to better medical decisions

NASA's Chris Mattmann discusses object-oriented data and health IT.

Can a data-sharing technology developed at NASA'S Jet Propulsion Laboratory create better outcomes for medicine?

In fact, it already is.

In this podcast, Chris Mattmann, a senior computer scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, talks with me about objected-oriented data technology (OODT) and health IT.

Mattman dives in to the following questions:

• What is object-oriented data technology (OODT) and how does it relate to health IT?
• How did NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory get involved with applying OODT to health IT?
• What's it been like for a NASA project to work within the Apache Incubator and the open source community?
• What is the Virtual Pediatric Intensive Care Unit?
• How will data-driven tools help doctors, researchers and patients make better medical decisions?

Chris Mattmann will speak about grid software and healthcare IT in the health track at next month's OSCON conference.

Four short links: 16 June 2010

Consulting, Idea-Gathering, Understanding Git, and Javascript Libraries

1. So You Want to Be A Consultant -- absolutely spot-on tips for understanding the true business of a consultant. (via Hacker News)
2. BBYIDX -- a free and open source idea-gathering application written in Ruby, [...] the basis of the Best Buy IdeaX website.
3. The Git Parable -- The following parable will take you on a journey through the creation of a Git-like system from the ground up. Understanding the concepts presented here will be the most valuable thing you can do to prepare yourself to harness the full power of Git. The concepts themselves are quite simple, but allow for an amazing wealth of functionality to spring into existence. (via Pete Warden)
4. Ext JS + jQTouch + Raphael = Sencha -- merging some touch and rich graphics libraries and developers. We’re setting up a foundation called Sencha Labs that will hold the copyright and trademarks for all the non-commercial projects affiliated with Sencha. Our license of choice for these projects is, and will continue to be, the MIT license. We will fund maintainers for our non-commercial projects with contributions from Sencha and the communities of these projects. (via bjepson on Twitter)

Recent Posts

• Gov 2.0 Hero Day | by Brian Ahier on June 15, 2010
• Four short links: 15 June 2010 | by Nat Torkington on June 15, 2010
• A constellation you should know | by Lucy Gray on June 14, 2010
• Four short links: 14 June 2010 | by Nat Torkington on June 14, 2010
• Makers versus Sponges | by Elizabeth Corcoran on June 14, 2010
• Gov 2.0 Week in Review | by Alex Howard on June 13, 2010
• European Union starts project about economic effects of open government data | by Andy Oram on June 11, 2010
• Here come the healthcare apps | by Alex Howard on June 11, 2010
• Four short links: 11 June 2010 | by Nat Torkington on June 11, 2010
• Can privacy, social media and business get along? | by Mac Slocum on June 10, 2010
• Four short links: 10 June 2010 | by Nat Torkington on June 10, 2010
• Streamlining craft in digital video | by Jim Stogdill on June 9, 2010