Mercury 11.07

The Mercury logic-programming language — which provides Java, Erlang and C# compilations — is now available as 11.07 from http://www.mercury.csse.unimelb.edu.au/download/release.html

No binary downloads are available so *nix requires a GNU C build and Windows requires Cygwin or MSYS.

Both x86-32 and x86-64 are supported.

SONY PlayStation network user credit card info hacked

 
The SONY admission that a hacker may have accessed all user info short of credit card 4-digit CSC's should lead to a class-action lawsuit in the USA.

Users should have had the option to use their hardware as the basis for a public-private key encryption of personal information.

The main reason not to do so is greed: SONY required access to pursue fraud and non-payment.  Let SONY now balance this against their present plight.

In all likelihood Oracle relational databases were used by SONY.  Storing strings in relational tables is easy for the developer and a joy for the hacker.  But what functionality could have required relational tables for the personal information of users? Well, it may have made things easier, faster and cheaper for the SONY info tech folks.  Manager gets bonus but users get ...

Sadly, the focus now is likely to be on network security.  And a Master appointed to advise a judge would likely come from the world in which Oracle DB tables are the norm for any and all data.

Access to data should have been on a process basis and no hacker should have been able to fork such a process: only such a process should have been able to convert that data into readable and usable information.

So ... had SONY used Erlang, would their customers be in this sad situation today?  And that is only one option from their asset stables.

Users will have a different view: regardless, of the technology in play, they should have been notified pronto.  Forget KISS, CRUD and ACID. The term of the day is PRONTO.

With any luck, the hacker was in for cred and not credit cards.  But SONY is a giant and this should be a sobering moment for corp IT that is public-facing.  And for users? Well, caveat emptor.  And then get a lawyer with a proven record in class actions.

Seven Languages and a few questions

Pragmatic Programmer has published Bruce Tate's Seven Languages.  I have some reservations.

The languages are Clojure, Haskell, Io, Prolog, Scala, Erlang, and Ruby.  Looks cool.  But look again.

Clojure is something of a Lisp reincarnate.  Io and Ruby are botrh Smalltalk in another guise: Ruby is Smalltalk in files à la Perl; Dekorte's Io is Smalltalk-2 (Self) + actor (but not morphic - for which see one brand of Squeak Smalltalk.)

Erlang is best understood as Prolog reduced.  So what would have been beyond 1974 Prolog? Oz.  Or Mercury.  Or XSB.  Or think outside the box with a chapter on Logtalk instead.

Scala Traits come from Squeak Smalltalk, btw.

I have no quarrel with Haskell being there, though some would argue for OCaml.

But if LISP is not there, what is Prolog doing there?  Why not JESS or Drools instead?  And not a single expression-based language (Rebol, ICON/UNICON ( and now ObjectIcon and Converge) or MIT Curl, the language (ww.curl.com.)

With Ruby there, we at least have a reminder that performance matters - so maybe it should have been JRuby.  But I can imagine how Pythonists might feel incensed.

I would suggest 12 languages in 12 months or 3 languages in 3 months.

Take a moment to look at the comments on the Prolog N-Queens code.  Is Tate claiming that the two files in question are his copyrighted code?  Compare the ICON code for N-Queens and ask whether you wouldn't be better looking there for an alternative language on your shelf.  And Rebol 3 is really starting to take shape over at Rebol.net, Rebol.org and Rebol.com

Most CS folks recall the course in which they were required to do some Prolog.  But would they skip a chapter on JESS or Logtalk?

The real story in Prolog in the past 25 years is constraint resolution, and that can be seen best in Oz.  But the reader will have to use emacs.  Oops.

I don't mean to knock Amzi! Prolog for Eclipse or many of the excellent Prolog projects such as swi-prolog.org (now with UNICODE and constraint-handling rules) but I would argue that what makes SWI interesting is Logtalk - and if there is RDF in the picture, that points to XSB.

Clojure, Haskell, Io, XSB, Scala, Erlang, JESS and JRuby in 8 weeks.  Ok, now I'm more likely to recommend a book.

"Clojure, F#, Io, Oz, Scala, Erlang, and JRuby in 7 months".  Call it "between vacations reading-and-testing-and-coding-and-designing".  And you would have my attention.

And whatever became of Tcl ( it only gave us Tk, Expect, Sqlite and now TclOO.)  Oops.

Oh, and Mercury now generates Erlang in addition to C or Java.

PS
Isn't concurrency coming to UNICON?  Isn't Oz now distributed Oz?  Isn't ObjectIcon at code.google.com/p/objecticon
Oh - right.  The cool factor.  And Smalltalk itself - after giving us so much and then the RefactoringBrowser and then UnitTest and pair-programming and eXtreme Programming and the wiki at c2.com ... is not yet cool again.  Might as well wait for Hermes2 on a non-Linux OS.
Oh - and Rebol is already PEG-equivalent at 300+ Kb core running with a claim to a whole 15 Mb of working memory.  Hmmm.