Questions you have to ask yourself

At LL2, Todd Proebsting had this very insightful talk on innovation in programming languages. His first slide is about a extract of an orbituary of Hamming

Richard Hamming’s three questions for new hires at Bell Labs:
1- What are you working on?
2- What’s the most important open problem in your area?
3- Why aren’t they the same? (Ouch!)

“You and Your Research” --- Richard Hamming (1986)

The whole video of his entertaining but insightful talk is at : http://web.mit.edu/webcast/ailab/mit-ll2-s2-09nov02-80k.ram What is amazing is that his talk can be applied to so many different problems areas not related to programming languages that it really strikes a chord with me. Some of the gems:

It's Bell Labs, we hired you because of your judgement but you are obviously not using your judgement because you are not working on the most important problems in your field

I am glad to hear you're on it

Undo is hard

(map fn L) vs. while (*d++ = *s++);

It's almost never a regular expression

Parsing is too hard

On disruptive constraint solvers:

You give up, which is what I did

Prolog is fine but it does not solve other problems

Objects are fine, I am giving you a 1000 of them