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Interview with Sun's Tim Bray and Radia Perlman
ReadWriteWeb writes "To celebrate the 15th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Richard MacManus interviewed two senior engineers from Sun Microsystems - Tim Bray (Director of Web Technologies) and Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer). The interview discusses the past and future of the Web, including the impact that Sun's servers have had over the years. Also discussed is the reason why Tim and Radia believe that P2P won't be a driving force on the Web going forward. Radia thinks that having central sites where people can register is key to making the Web scalable and more secure."
There's a difference between decentralising the infrastructure and decentralising the control. Radia Perlman's thesis is a good example: a robust, decentralised routing protocol made possible by a centralised PKI.
I wouldn't be so condescending about the suggestion... Radia Perlman has accomplished more for modern networking and the internet that you probably will in your lifetime. She is more than just a "sun employee." She is inteventer of the Spanning Tree Protocol amoung other things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanning_tree_protoco l.
Maybe check out her book, Interconnections, on Amazon to get a feel for the type of work she does.
COBOL was not the first high-level programming language, not by a long shot. There were already languages that knew how to interpret formulas (FORTRAN), process complex data structures (LISP) and even primitives forms of block structuring (Algol). The one big idea that COBOL added to the mix was that source code should resemble natural language (IF X EQUALS 3 OR 4 ADD 1 TO X). Hopper had to have been pretty ignorant about the sheer ambiguity of natural language to make this mistake.
Given some of the comments about wanting more context, I've now done a podcast of the entire interview.