How might capitalism change ?

There is an old idea, that you need two drivers for a major change to occur ... like fiber optic cable became so prevalent because of the rising requirement for telecommunications bandwidth + a coincidental/consequential spike in the price of copper.

A lot has been happening over the last 20 years to give one pause as to whether Capitalism will be the engine of our society for the next 500 years, as it has for the last.  A lot has also been written about the impact of robots to jobs, but for many of us, this seems distant.

Then you read an article like Self-Driving Cars Will Improve Our Cities.  If They Don't Ruin Them.  and you realize several things.  2020 is just around the corner, 7+ million is a lot of US jobs and that those jobs had traditionally been considered safer.  Offshoring was the usual worry, but mitigated by taste, shipping or locality issues.

The dissatisfaction seen in the current US election, suggests the popular notion that the lobbyists and politicians have messed up Capitalism and that only a businessman can get us all back to prosperity.  Rather I posit that the financial excess common at the end of any great expansion and our technical progress have wildly outrun our societal structures, that there is no usual remedy needing just a stern hand to apply.  This will become apparent as an industry the size of transportation is soon revolutionized.

Dartino ... overnight success?

I joined Object Technology International (OTI) in the mid 90's, leveraging my Smalltalk and engineering background, to work in their embedded Smalltalk team.  Embedded Smalltalk in those days was a pretty tough sell, but some companies realized the advantages of superior language and tooling.  Many of the target boards had only a serial link to the development machine, so the traditional compile/download/printf cycle was a lengthy, productivity sapping exercise.  Envy/Developer offered a Smalltalk IDE and runtime environment, with the ability to do remote debugging and hot code replacement.  Once the runtime was loaded onto the target, smaller application code bundles could be downloaded and executed.  A remote debugger on the development machine meant you could set breakpoints and/or single step your code to find bugs, edit the offending code, drop the stack and resume execution all from inside the debugger.

Dave Thomas, OTI founder, in a wide ranging presentation You Can’t Do That With Smalltalk! - Can You? Lessons From The Past – Challenges For The Future gives an overview of the commercial impact of Smalltalk and references some of the embedded uses, particularly the Tektronix TDS 500 Series oscilloscope built with a 68020 processor, approx 250 classes and using less than 64kB RAM.

Fast forward through the introduction of Java, the drive with J2ME to address the mobile device market, then the Android asteroid which laid waste to many existing players. Web development meanwhile was moving to Javascript and Node.js, in response to the benefits of a dynamic language and simplified deployment.  There were issues with tooling and scale, and Google released the Dart language as one answer to these challenges.  To an outsider, Dart appears a very pragmatic and tempered approach to language design, with a careful balance between performance, familiarity and feature. Several of the core team were also instrumental in the development at Animorphic Systems in 1996 of Strongtalk, an advanced, high performance Smalltalk with optional typing.

The maker movement and success of Arduino raised the profile of embedded computing, but many of the old barriers to entry remained.  Some platforms offered simplified coding and numerous libraries, but poor debug.  Others were fine for simple demands, but failed to scale.  Then Fletch was announced last year and rebranded last month as Dartino.  With a catchy name, Dartino brings Dart to the world of microcontrollers. Nicely described in a talk by Kasper Lund "Internet of Programmable Things" at the GOTO Copenhagen 2015 conference, Dartino sets out to simplify embedded development and bring an advanced language onto constrained platforms.  Take a look at: characteristics of the runtime, consideration of the subsystems, the interface between the compiler and runtime, and the introduction of Fibers.  The 32bit STM32F7 microcontroller mentioned, with 320kB RAM and clocked at 216 MHz, is certainly an interesting starting point.

Dartino has the pedigree and potential to open embedded development to a wider and younger developer audience, to compliment the hardware opportunity offered by the Raspberry Pi and more.  An overnight success? 20 years in the making.

Err ...

Time is not on our side ....

From  Arctic Melting - 2015

"
That low pressure will suck air out of the planet’s middle latitudes and send it rushing to the Arctic. And so on Wednesday, the North Pole will likely see temperatures of about 35 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2 degrees Celsius. That’s 50 degrees hotter than average: it’s usually 20 degrees Fahrenheit below zero there at this time of year.
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and The Atlantic

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2015 is the warmest year ever recorded. Thirteen of the top 14 warmest years on the books have happened this century. And here in the United States, it has been a hot, strange month. Many cities across the northeast smashed their Christmas and Christmas Eve temperature records not at midday, but at the stroke of midnight. For the hundred-plus years that New York temperatures have been recorded, the city has never been warmer than 63 degrees Fahrenheit on a December 24. Yet at 1 a.m. on Christmas Eve of this year, the thermometermeasured 67 degrees.
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"
Some of this North American heat is a regular feature of every El Niño. (Indeed, I wrote about this El Niño-associated heat a few weeks ago.) But in the Arctic, this level of warmth is unprecedented. In order for this huge, hot storm to reach Iceland on Wednesday, it’s punching  right through the Jet Stream, the atmospheric “river” that brings temperate weather to Europe. Yet El Niño should typically reinforce this current, explains the climate writer Robert Scribbler—for the Jet Stream toweaken is a sign that something else is going on.
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