Jack Tramiel, the founder of Commodore, passed away yesterday, April 8, at the age of 83. As the man who brought the VIC-20, Commodore 64 and and Atari ST to market, Tramiel's business savvy helped to bring computing to the masses. The Commodore 64, alone, did more to expand the audience for home computers than just about any of the systems introduced in the 1980's.

In December of 2007, I had the pleasure of meeting Jack at the 25th anniversary party for the C64 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. It was a spectacular evening, which is fully documented in photographs here.

I wrote a piece that evening which for some reason I didn't manage to get onto the Web. Tramiel talked about his life and work that evening. I attempted to collect as much of his talk into this piece, at the time. Here, then, is entire article about the Commodore 64 25th Anniversary.

Tramiel kicked off the evening by speaking to New York Times journalist John Markoff. During their chat on stage, Tramiel recalled the triumphs of his life. Tramiel was born in Poland in 1928, and was sent to the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II. When he was liberated by the Americans in 1945, Tramiel emigrated to the United States. Once there, he joined the army.

“When I came to the US I definitely felt I owed something to this country. I believe always in paying back. I lived in the east side of New York City for the first three months, and almost felt like I was back in Poland with the smell of the herring and the onions. I felt that I had to learn what this country was all about, so I joined the army, and served the country. That took me to Fort Dix,” said Tramiel.

At Fort Dix, Tramiel learned how to repair typewriters. That skill would support him when he returned to civilian life in New York. Eventually, after working two jobs and continuing to fix typewriters, Tramiel quit to start his own business across the street from Forham University. That school sent their typewriters to Tramiel for repairs. Before long, he was manufacturing his own machines.

The name of the company, right from the start, was Commodore. Tramiel said he got the name from his time in the army. “I wanted to call my company General, but there's so many Generals in the U.S. General Electric, General Motors. Then I went to Admiral, but that was taken too. So I wind up in Berlin, Germany with my wife and we were in a cab, and the cab made a short stop and in front of it was an Texas Instruments. Soon, TI decided that it wanted to be the one in control of the expanding market for handheld digital calculators, and the company slowed down chip shipments to Tramiel.

Thus, Commodore's future, Tramiel decided, would be held in owning and controlling its own chip supply. Commodore had previously purchased processors from MOS Technologies, Tramiel found himself talking to that company in the late 70's.

“I called them. We met. They were in very bad financial shape. They needed help. I decided to buy this company and turn it over to become strictly a Commodore supplier, except for companies like Apple to which we would supply some,” said Tramiel.

Along with the purchase of MOS, Commodore inherited a young developer named Chuck Peddle, who wanted to build a personal computer, a relatively odd-ball idea for 1976. Eventually, Peddle produced the Commodore PET, also known as the personal electronic transactor.

At the time, said Tramiel, he had no idea how many PETs to build. “We were told why don't you go up to Arthur D. Little, and they will tell you what this market can stand. The first thing [Arthur D. Little] told me was cost that it would cost $5 million and take one year. Then I found out that the same company had told IBM not to buy Xerox. I decided 'nope, gonna go another way.' We went and we advertised the PET in the Wall Street Journal: 3 full pages. A couple weeks later we had $3 million in sales, and we knew we had a winner,” said Tramiel.

The PET gave way to the VIC-20, the first personal computer to sell one million units. But that was nothing compared to Commodore's next product.

In August of 1982, the Commodore 64 peaked its head out from the shelves of Sears and Montgomery Wards around the country. From the time of its release to the time of its discontinuation in 1995, Tramiel estimated that his company sold around 30 million units. “I remember we sold 480,000 to 500,000 computers a month. That slowed down when I left in 1984. I understand we sold between 22 million and 30 million units,” said Tramiel.

Of course games were, perhaps, the C64's greatest contribution to the world of computer history. With classics such as Ultima III, Boulder Dash, Commando, The Last Ninja, and Lode Runner all made the system a huge success around the world. The system's unrivalled ability to produce 16-color graphics and three-channel sound made it the first major platform for graphics and sound demos, which continue today. Now known as the demo scene, graphic and visual programmers made the C64 into a media presentation system long before the MP3 and the Divx codec.

Tramiel said he was aware of all this creativity his product unleashed. “People came over to me at shows and told me how successful they are, and I was very proud of it,” he said. Perhaps the single greatest strength of the C64 was its price tag. When it was introduced in Las Vegas in early 1982, most show-goers found it impossible to think that this computer with 64KB of RAM could be sold for $595. The secret was Tramiel's decision the buy MOS Technologies, and his philosophy of business: “I believe that if you can afford it, you should always sell a product for no more than 100% of the price it costs to produce it.”

Tramiel's peers was also in attendance to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the C64. Al Alcorn, employee number one at Atari, said that, when he was with that company (long before Tramiel purchased its Consumer Division and appropriated the name), Commodore was seen as untouchable. “We came up with the Atari computer to stop Steve (Wozniak) from stealing our employees (at Apple). We wanted to avoid competing with Commodore because of that price,” said Acorn.

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Computer, said that his own company's machines were often seen as too expensive after the C64 arrived. “After a while, every time I went to shows they had their C64's! This was at one show after another after another after another. Of course, they wanted an Apple, but they couldn't afford one,” said Wozniak.

But Tramiel and Wozniak share more than their storied pasts in the personal computer business. Tramiel related a little known tale during the proceedings at the behest of Markoff. Tramiel, like Wozniak, had a near-death experience on a plane in the 1980's.

“At Commodore we had a plane called the PET Jet. [Tramiel's wife] Helen and I and 6 other members of Commodore went from New York to California,” said Tramiel, “but we made a stop to pick up dealers in Chicago. On the way from Chicago to San Jose, the plane started smoking. There were no brakes, no radio. The smoke got very black. I heard a signal of some kind, and we landed in Des Moines Iowa. We exited the plane, and after a few minutes, the plane blew up.”

Do you remember when software development was an exciting, dynamic industry? When innovative technologies, revolutionary products, and compelling insights competed for our attention? When every day seemed to change the world in ways that challenged us?

It seems like that sometimes, doesn't it?

I've had such feelings now and then, but I've always shrugged them off. I tell myself that programmers who are just breaking into the field find today's technologies plenty exciting. The world hasn't changed, I have.

Or maybe not.

I've done some research lately into the history of our profession. And I was struck by all the amazing things that happened in one year. It was 1993. And it was a different world. Today really is boring compared to 1993.

What happened in 1993?

Books, for one thing. Our brightest thinkers were publishing world-changing ideas. Twelve months saw the publication of:

• Steve McConnell's Code Complete

• Grady Booch's Object-Oriented Design and Analysis with Applications, Second Ed.

• Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography

• Bjarne Stroustrup's The Design and Evolution of C++

• P.J. Plauger's Programming on Purpose

• Steve Maguire's Writing Solid Code.

I could argue that any one of those books changed the world. The half-dozen, considered together, constitute a revolution in the theory and practice of software development.

What else happened in 1993?

• Visual C++ was introduced.

• Yukihiro Matsumoto began work on the language that would eventually be known as Ruby.

• Microsoft released its groundbreaking version 3.0 of Visual Basic, including the JET Database Engine. The company begun integrating Visual Basic for Applications into its Office apps.

• Windows NT –the first 32-bit version of Windows—was released.

• Intel introduced the Pentium, the first mass-market 32-bit processor for desktop computing.

• Apple debuted its Newton personal digital assistant.

• Novell bought Unix Systems Labs from AT&T.

• Windows applications outsold MS-DOS applications for the first time.

• SunSelect introduced WABI, the Windows Application Binary Interface, which allowed Windows applications to run under Unix.

• Patrick Volkerding released Slackware, the first standalone commercial Linux distribution.

• The White House got its first Web page. President Clinton set up e-mail addresses for himself, First Lady Hillary Clinton, and Vice-President Al Gore. (A year later, Gore coined the term “Information Superhighway” and claimed to have invented the Internet.)

• The Mosaic Web browser was released.

• Leading Unix vendor Santa Cruz Operation went public. SCO was part of the Common Open Software Environment along with Hewlett-Packard, Unix Systems Laboratories, IBM, Univel, and SunSoft. The coalition worked to standardize Unix and strengthen its position on the desktop and on the Internet.

• FreeBSD 1.0 was released.

• Apple introduced AppleScript as part of the System 7 Pro operating system for the Macintosh.

• Microsoft introduced COM, the Component Object Model, the basis for OLE, OLE Automation, ActiveX, COM+, and DCOM technologies.

You see? It really was a heck of a year.

Web recommendation: I've been a fan of physicist Richard P. Feynman for a long time—his two volumes of autobiographical writing are well worth reading. You'll get a taste of the scientist's unique way of thinking on this wonderful page. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. His research assistant is brilliant, efficient, accommodating, and more than a bit sexy.

Jacob “Jack” Goldman, who left Ford Motor Co. to launch Xerox Corp.'s Palo Alto Research Center, died on December 20, 2011 at age 90.

A physicist by training, Goldman taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and MIT before leaving academia for industry. As director of Ford's Scientific Research Laboratory, he succeeded by recruiting top talent and giving them free rein to innovate. He maintained that tradition at Xerox, where he served as chief scientist, chief technical officer, and senior vice president for research and development. Goldman established two of the company's R&D centers: the Xerox Research Center of Canada and Xerox PARC.

It is not hyperbole to say that researchers at PARC created the modern computing world. Among their inventions are the personal computer, the laser printer, the graphical user interface, Ethernet, bitmap graphics, the WYSIWYG text editor, the Smalltalk language and IDE, and the notion of ubiquitous computing.

People say that Xerox PARC did the research that made Apple and Microsoft successful, and in a sense that is true. Apple's pre-Macintosh GUI-based system, the Lisa, was heavily influenced by Xerox PARC work. In fact, Xerox earned the right to purchase 100,000 shares of pre-IPO Apple stock by giving Apple engineers three days' access to PARC. It was during those three days that the Lisa – and ultimately the Macintosh – were born. Microsoft's Bill Gates was also a visitor to PARC. Microsoft tech visionaries Larry Tessler, Charles Simonyi, and others were recruited from PARC.

PARC – it's a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox now, and no longer called Xerox PARC – continues to do important research on cutting-edge topics in computer science.

Web recommendation: Irresistible. 'Nuff said. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. At the moment, he doesn't own a suit.

Intellectual property law was created to protect the rights of creators over products of the mind. Speaking loosely: Patents protect inventions. Trademark protection covers names, images, and designs used in commerce. Copyright covers literary and artistic works, including both tangible artifacts and intangibles such as performances. Trade-secret protection is for information that owners keep secret to maintain competitive advantage.

The intersection of intellectual property law and software development is a fascinating and potentially lucrative field. The application of traditional intellectual property law to software is not always straightforward. It is generally acknowledged, for instance, that computer source code is subject to copyright protection – it is, after all, a written work, same as a novel or screenplay. (Well, sort of the same.) Of course, the same source-code file might be protected by patent law or trade-secret protection. You are surely aware that software patents have become very big business in recent years. If your job is in jeopardy of being outsourced or offshored, consider leveraging your technical expertise into a new career as a patent agent. You don't even have to go to law school – just pass the patent bar exam (you can find review materials and courses online) and you're in business. According to one site, patent agents earn about 25 percent more than software engineers.

But I digress.

The relationship between software and patent law is straightforward compared to the intersection of software and copyright protection. Specifically, it is unclear whether or not computer programming languages should be eligible for copyright protection. Uncertainties and apprehensions have attended this question for a long time.

A couple decades ago, Borland International – a publisher of C and Pascal compilers, spreadsheets, and database systems – was at the center of the copyrighting-a-language controversy. On the one hand, Borland was sued by Lotus, which claimed that because Borland's Quattro Pro duplicated a portion of Lotus 1-2-3's “command structure” – the keystrokes controlling operation of the spreadsheet – Borland was guilty of violating Lotus's copyrighted language. (Borland prevailed in court, setting a precedent against the copyrightability of programming languages.) At about the same time, Borland acquired dBase publisher Ashton-Tate, which was at the time litigating against Fox Software, whose database system implemented the dBase programming language. In this case, Borland's interests were on the opposite side of the copyrighting-a-language issue. No one knows how the judges might have ruled: Borland agreed to drop the case, and all future cases based on infringement of the dBase programming language, in return for regulatory approval of its acquisition of Ashton-Tate. It is important to note, however, that the U.S. Justice Department's Antitrust Division did not reject the copyrightability of the dBase language in its 1991 Competitive Impact Statement. It merely enjoined Borland from pursuing infringement lawsuits. (Read more here.)

Fast-forward to August 2010, when Oracle sued Google for alleged intellectual-property violations in the Android operating system. Alongside 50 alleged patent violations was this claim: “Oracle America owns copyrights in the code, documentation, specifications, libraries, and other materials that comprise the Java platform.” In particular, Oracle alleges that Google violated its copyright by implementing copyrighted Java APIs and copying a dozen small library source files. The source-file issue isn't interesting – source-code files are obviously copyrightable. But if you can copyright a language's APIs, are you copyrighting the language? It's hard to say. We'll have to wait for the judge's ruling – this case is still pending. (Read more here.)

Outside the U.S., the applicability of copyright law to programming languages is being tested in the United Kingdom, where SAS Institute, a publisher of statistical-analysis software, has brought suit against competitor World Programming Ltd., alleging that World has duplicated the SAS programming language in its software. Again, we are waiting for a judge's ruling (the case is being adjudicated by the UK High Court). There is an interesting twist, however. In July 2010, the British court asked for guidance from the Court of Justice of the European Union. Specifically, the court asked the CJEU if programming languages could be copyrighted. The court has not ruled on the issue, but it has released a statement from the office of Advocate General Yves Bot, whose advisory statements are almost always followed by the court. Bot dismissed the idea the languages could be copyrighted: “The functionalities of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright.” Should the court adopt this position, the matter would essential be closed throughout the European Union. (Read more here.)

Should languages be subject to copyright? I keep scratching my head. I can definitely see both sides of this fascinating issue.

Web recommendation: I read an interesting report on language choice and software quality today. The report was produced by an international consulting firm called CAST, which says it has analyzed 365 million lines of code in 745 IT applications. A language-by-language comparison shows the highest density of bad code in Java EE applications, while COBOL applications show the fewest problems. CAST, which advocates metrics in software development and management, makes a summary of the report available on its Web site for free, though you must fill out a registration form to get at the data. I'm not wholly convinced, but the report is food for thought. You can read it here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He plays a mean game of gin rummy.

For a few months now, I've been intending to comment on a short essay by SD Times blogger Victoria Reitano. Maybe you remember it. Reitano posted “Software development: manufacturing process or creative idea?” from Salt Lake City's Agile 2011 conference back in August. The title caught my eye immediately. Reitano's question is a variant of a classic recurring debate: Programming: Art or science? It seems like everyone has taken a shot at this question at one point or another:

• Blog post: Knuth: Computer programming as an art

• Question on Object Mix forum: Is programming/computer science an art or a science?

• MSDN article by Stanley B. Lippman, circa 2006: Is programming an art?

• Slashdot discussion: Is programming art?

• Net Objectives blog post by Bob Hartman: Is programming an art or a science?

• Follow-up post by Bob Hartman: Is programming an art or a science? (Part II)

• Blog post by Aater Suleman: Is programming an art or a science?

• CodingForums.com discussion thread: Programming: An art or science?

• CatsOnKeyboards.com blog post: Programming: Art, not science

• Rebuttal to Lippman's MSDN article: Dear Stanley B. Lippman

• Blog post by Rodrigo Monteiro: Programming is art

• Blog post at O'Reilly's ONLamp.com: Is programming art?

• Discussion thread at </dream.in.code>: Programming: A science or an art?

• Knuth's original essay (PDF): Computer programming as an art

If you think I'm going to wade into this debate, you're crazy. The problem is that the question, as framed, doesn't allow for a sensible answer.

You want to know what programming is? It's...a creative discipline. I know, because it tickles the same part of my brain that is tickled by other creative disciplines.

When I was young, I had very serious musical ambitions. I did a fair bit of composing. You know what I liked about it? The combination of rigor and complexity. Musical composition requires mastery of a hugely complex set of rules, some inherent in nature and some established more arbitrarily through centuries of tradition. Despite the thousands of rules, composers are expected to exercise immense creativity. In fact, creativity is a sine qua non for achievement in musical composition.

Architecture is much the same. Those who design buildings must first master in-depth knowledge of materials, structural relationships, and historical precedent, all of which are more or less binding upon their subsequent efforts. Yet within these bounds, they must employ their creative senses to create aesthetic affects.

I think that even chess-playing is a creative discipline, at a certain level of seriousness. The would-be grand-master must internalize a complex set of more or less arbitrary rules, then deploy his pawns and pieces according to an overall strategy that can only be described as artistic.

Cooking and the writing of fiction rely upon similar mixes of complex conventions and an aesthetic element based on creativity.

Human brains – at least the brains of computer programmers, composers, architects, chess players, cooks, and writers – are drawn to tasks that conform to this mix of requirements. The essential elements are complexity, rigorous rules, and the opportunity for creative expression.

We programmers like to think of ourselves as a unique branch of humanity, spawned mere decades ago along with the microprocessor. But that isn't the case. Our love of complexity, rigor, and creativity makes us more, not less, human.

Web recommendation: I love the blogs at SD Times and I feel honored to have a home here. If you're looking to do some reading, you could scarcely do better than browsing the archives here – even before I joined the team a few months ago, the nuggets among these posts were pithy and frequent. But if you find that you have additional time and curiosity, then you simply must check out the blog network at Scientific American. These posts are funny, serious, timely, in-depth, provocative, and relevant. Be warned – if you dip your virtual toe into these waters, you may find yourself drawn in like Hylas among the nymphs. The Scientific American blog directory is here. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He likes pizza, but who doesn't?

I had my consciousness raised about Alan Turing the other day.

I'd heard of Turing, of course. Everyone knows about the Turing Test, which has emerged as the de facto benchmark for achievement of machine intelligence. And you may know that the ACM's most prestigious award, the so-called Nobel Prize for computer science, is called the Turing Award. (Winners include Alan Kay, Frederick Brooks, Doug Englebart, Niklaus Wirth, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson...a literal who's-who of pioneers in our field.) That, plus the hazy idea that Turing was involved in using early computing machines to break German codes during World War II, was the extent of my knowledge.

I've read up on the eccentric genius because of a controversy that has arisen in his home country of England.

It seems that after his major role in saving thousands of lives and hastening the end of World War II, Turing was rewarded by being prosecuted for “gross indency.” Being homosexual was illegal in 1950s England. Turing lost his security clearance, which meant he could no longer work for the UK Government Communications Headquarters. Convicted of the crime, he avoided imprisonment by accepting chemical castration – pharmaceutical treatments intended to eliminate his sex drive. Two years later, at the age of 41, he committed suicide. It was a tragic end to a brilliant life.

Even without his contributions to the Allies in World War II, Turing would be remembered as the author of “On Computable Numbers,” a 1936 paper that established the conceptual basis for today's computers. Computer scientists continue to mine his 1950 paper, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” for insights. It was in this paper that the mathematician formulated the intelligence-identification game that has come to be known as the Turing Test. (A $100,000 prize from the Cambridge Center for Behavioural Studies is waiting for the first team to program a computer to pass the test.) At England's University of Manchester, Turing worked on the Mark 1, one of the first modern computers.

In 2009, English prime minister Gordon Brown apologized for the treatment Turing received from the government. “On behalf of the British government,” he said, “and all those who live freely thanks to Alan's work I am very proud to say: We're sorry, you deserved so much better.”

Some Turing fans believe the apology doesn't do enough, however. They are collecting e-signatures on a petition at the British government's official e-petitions site. “We ask the [sic] HM Government to grant a pardon to Alan Turing for the conviction of 'gross indecency,'” the petition says. “In 1952, he was convicted...Two years later, he killed himself with cyanide, aged just 41. Alan Turing was driven to a terrible despair and early death by the nation he'd done so much to save. This remains a shame on the UK government and UK history.”

Next year – 2012 – marks the 100-year anniversary of Turing's birth. A large number of universities, research organizations, and software companies have come together to plan a celebration called the Alan Turing Year. Events are planned all over the world. If there is any justice, Turing will receive his pardon during his centenary year.

Web recommendation: I've never worked in a Fortune 500 company, but a couple of times I've served as a middle manager in what I considered large corporations. I remember that those companies lived according to an “e-mail culture.” Our workdays were centered around Outlook, and we spent considerable time reading, writing, filing, and organizing internal e-mail messages. I figured the overflowing in-box was a small price to pay for eliminating meetings that would otherwise be necessary...but maybe I was wrong. The CEO of a large British firm is banning internal e-mails, calling for increased use of telephone calls, tweets, and instant messaging. In an interview with a BBC reporter, Atos's Thierry Breton explains his reasoning. I found it completely persuasive. But don't take my word for it. You can check out the interview here: Atos boss Thierry Breton defends his internal e-mail ban. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He didn't get much sleep last night, but has high hopes for tonight.

The software development firmament has lost one of its brightest lights. Dennis Ritchie, who created C and co-created Unix, has reportedly passed away after a long illness.

The self-effacing Ritchie was the recipient of the development world's most prestigious awards, including the ACM Turing Award, the IEEE Richard W. Hamming Medal, the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award, the IEEE Emanuel R. Piore Award, a Bell Laboratories fellowship, the ACM Software System Award, the U.S. National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and the Japan Prize for Information and Communications. Ritchie was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 1988.

Ritchie's C language is still widely used. It has also served as the basis for C++, Java, C#, Objective-C, Perl, Python, and PHP. Unix is omnipresent, as is its open-source derivative, Linux. Ritchie's influence on our profession has been both deep and broad. He will be sorely missed.

Web recommendation: I am more comfortable writing paragraphs than class declarations, but even I hate writing documentation. Unfortunately, I've never had the luxury of turning over my apps to a tech-writing team...I've had to write the docs myself. It's a tedious and thankless task. Maybe that's why so much documentation is so lousy. Even if you aren't responsible for user docs, you should still document your work for the benefit of other developers who use it – and developers who will use it in the future. Get started with this thoughtful blog post from ProgrammableWeb.com: The Six Pillars of Complete Developer Documentation. Food for thought. J.D. say check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.

What does the future of software development look like? For the first time in decades, it appears that no one knows.

It used to be fairly easy to peek a few years into programming's future. Languages evolved according to a predictable path from lower to higher levels of abstraction. We incorporated objects, then visual development environments, then Web architectures, then managed-code platforms. Development methodologies and project-management philosophies approached with plenty of warning – it took no special insight to see them coming.

My subjective feeling – backed up by a few hours of earnest Googling – is that all of that has changed.

The future? Well, let's see. We have some broad agreement that development methods will become more agile, though we are not entirely sure what agility means. It seems clear that the future will be cloud-oriented, though every definition of “cloud” is different. Our code will need to adapt to the availability of parallel architectures, though we can't say whether the parallelism should or will reside primarily in the code we write, the libraries we incorporate, the tools we use, or the architectures we employ. Security, mobile platforms, portability, interoperability, declarative programming, functional programming...all are likely to be important. One way or another.

As for languages – oh my! At the moment it appears that every nontrivial app will incorporate modules, libraries, frameworks, and custom code written in multiple programming languages. Or maybe we'll resolve that complexity by adopting a new language with the flexibility to address all the challenges we face.

For once, the pundits are quiet. Search the net for predictions about the future of software development and you'll retrieve a list of Web pages that are years out of date and devoted to particular narrow problem or language domains.

We are in need of the same sort of paradigm-buster that object-oriented programming and visual development environments were, back in the Windows era.

Search long enough through all the partisan arguments and language-specific rants, and one name keeps coming up: Anders Hejlsberg.

Hejlsberg has been around the programming world since before the IBM PC. He is the original author of Borland's Turbo Pascal and Delphi, and since he joined Microsoft he has created C# and become director of Microsoft's programming-language strategy.

You can learn more about Hejlsberg and his views in these videos:

• Where are programming languages going?

• Trends and future directions in programming languages

• Tour through computing industry history at the Microsoft Museum

(Disclaimer: Hejlsberg's views are pretty much guaranteed to be the official views of Microsoft. I'm the last person to sign up mindlessly to Microsoft's view of the world. While I don't see the company as a customer-exploiting evil empire, neither do I think it has always acted in the development community's best interests. Although I owned and edited Windows Tech Journal, my relationship with Microsoft was always an arm's-length one – much, as it turns out, to my personal cost. But that's a long story for another day. What I'm trying to say is that you have a responsibility to take Hejlsberg's point of view with a grain of salt.)

I think the Hejlsberg videos have great value. They identify both the challenges facing our community and some of the technologies and approaches that will help us address them. Hejlsberg has proved himself to be a visionary throughout his career, and he is uniquely positioned to see the problems and possible solutions that we will encounter in the next few years.

What's your view of the future? Drop a keyword or two into the comment section below and I'll use your feedback to shape a future post. Because ultimately, the future isn't something that just happens. It's something we create. Together.

Web recommendation: Research for this post brought me for the first time to Microsoft's MSDN Channel 9. This Web site contains hundreds of videos about (Microsoft) technology and how to get the most out of it. There's a predictable amount of corporate flag-waving, of course. But there's also tons of useful content. I have some reservations about video as the medium for dispersing such information – text is more readily searched and recalled, in my view. But there's no denying that there's real value here, for free. And the site has a mission statement you can dance to. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.

Samuel Palmisano recently spoke at the Computer History Museum about the history of IBM. As CEO of that company, he's in the unique position of, likely, being the only person within all of IBM to see the entire picture. It is a massive company, you know, with fingers in just about every business computing pie on the planet. But it wasn't always about pie, according to Palmisano's talk at the CHM. Sometime ago, there was cheese too.

Consider the companies that defined over the past half-century… the mainframe, minicomputer, PC and Internet eras. Most of these firms are gone or absorbed. Burroughs, Univac, DEC, Data General, Wang, Prime, Compaq, Sun, Silicon Graphics, Tandem, Apollo. The list could go on.

So, in the face of that, what has enabled IBM to survive and thrive?

People who are familiar with our history are often struck not merely by our longevity… but with the fact that we have continually changed. As we see in "Revolutions," IBM began by making punched-card tabulators. What we don't see here is that we also made clocks, scales… and cheese slicers!

I'm told they were really good cheese slicers.

A funny thing happened on the way to writing this blog post.

I'd intended to serve up an enthusiastic review of A.K. Dewdney's The (New) Turing Omnibus: 66 Excursions in Computer Science. I really can't help recommending the book. It's a classic collection of short essays on essential topics on computer science, including finite automata, genetic algorithms, Karnaugh maps, Cook's theorem, and more.

I loved the original edition of this book when it came out in 1989 (there were just 61 chapters, or “excursions,” in that edition). The new version includes the full text of that book along with five bonus chapters on emerging topics, including a fascinating overview of the theory underlying computer viruses.

The (New) Turing Omnibus is intended to be a crossover book. While the writing style and approach make it accessible to those with no background in computer science (assuming they have sufficient motivation to wrestle with the mathematics, concepts, and notation), I think the book is really more useful as a sort of review or refresher for professionals. I've never written any code in the computer vision realm, but after reading Dewdney's essay on the topic I feel I have a basic understanding of the field. It's this kind of mind expansion that I expect, and receive, from Dewdney, who served for years as the author of the Computer Recreations and Mathematical Recreations columns in Scientific American.

As you can see, I think The (New) Turing Omnibus is a swell book. And under ordinary circumstances I would have no hesitation about recommending that you pick up a copy for yourself and for any nascent computer scientists in your life.

Here's my problem. In addition to the lucent writing, academic rigor, relevant topic selection, and overall terrific work in his computer-science essays, Dewdney contributes articles to an organization that has branded the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 a conspiracy. I spent a couple hours at the organization's Web site – I won't mention it by name here because I don't want to encourage traffic to the site – and found that it includes material I find not only wacky, but hateful.

I now face an ethical dilemma. How do I recommend that you purchase a copy of this truly good book when each sale benefits an author who holds and promotes ideas I can't accept?

I might have kept silent, choosing another book or idea as the topic for this post. But that would have deprived my readers of the knowledge of this truly admirable book, which I believe you will find both interesting and useful.

Or I could go ahead with my recommendation, despite the fact that my words indirectly benefit an author whose beliefs are contrary to my own – and, in my opinion, to both common sense and moral decency.

As you can see, I loosed this Gordian knot by choosing a third path. I've recommended the book and shared my ethical misgivings with you. Because ethical people can choose different courses of action in this circumstance, I have passed my dilemma along to you.

You're welcome.

What's your opinion? Is a good book a good book, regardless of the source? Or do ethical principles require us to evaluate the beneficiaries of our actions, and to refrain from contributing to the well-being of those whose actions harm the world? Drop me a line in the comment section below.

I look forward to hearing from you. And oh, yeah – for those of you who find my name vaguely familiar – it's great to be back. I look forward to chatting with you frequently here at SD Times.

Web recommendation: I hope to pass along the link to an interesting or useful Web site at the end of each of these posts. In this installment I recommend Coding Horror: Programming and Human Factors (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/). Jeff Atwood's blog isn't updated as often as I'd like, but it's full of on-target observations, in-depth contemplations, and random good stuff. J.D. says check it out.

J.D. Hildebrand has written hundreds of articles for dozens of publications and online communities dedicated to software development. He recently relocated to a small town outside Belgrade – stop by if your travels take you through Serbia.