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Windows & .NET Watch: Programming for Profit

By Larry O'Brien

April 1, 2010 — (Page 1 of 3)
The phone rang at 4:01 in the morning.

“I’ve got something for you!”

“Is that you, Fabian? Where are you?”

“New York City, where else? Empire State of Mind, cuz! Look, I’ve designed a programming language.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“You won’t be. I’ve totally solved the concurrency problem. See, in my Profit programming language, when a function returns a value, what it really turns is a placeholder. Only when it’s read does the system guarantee that the value has actually been calculated.”

“That’s called a future!” I said, sitting up in bed, “And I agree that it’s a great—”

“It’s called an IOU,” interrupted Fabian, “It stands for Indeterminate—Object Unknown.”

“OK,” I said as I started up my laptop and put on water for coffee. “But I totally get it: You gain a lot of scheduling flexibility if your guarantees about processing are initially weak and you return a placeholder. Then at some point you call get_future, which blocks until the value is available, recursively triggering any other required processing.”

“You call DUE, which stands for Delay Until Evaluated, and I’d appreciate it if you stopped interrupting me with your unimaginative terminology. What are you, a C++ programmer? Now, if I may continue… When you call DUE on an IOU, it turns into CASH. CASH stands for CASH All Sub-Hierarchies.”

“I think I’m beginning to see where you’re going with this. OK, so how do you handle composability? If an IOU can’t be turned into CASH when you call it DUE, you want to be able to use spare processing power to CASH the other IOUs you happen to be holding.”

“That’s where my system shines! That’s the job of the BANC! It Balances All Nebulous Concurrency! The BANC subsystem is constantly evaluating all the IOUs in the system and converts them to CASH on an as-needed basis. It’s extraordinarily sophisticated, allowing the number of outstanding IOUs to greatly exceed the total processing capability of the computer at any time.”

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Microsoft details WCF and WF in next-gen .NET
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