You can view your career as a sequence of choice and context. Choice influences context, which in turn influences the next choice. Along the way, there are ups and downs such as working with great colleagues on fascinating projects, obtaining degrees, awards, publications, patents and money; and in the other direction, involuntary unemployment, or wasting one’s talents. What were my choices? What was I thinking at the time? What happened next?

Starting in graduate school, I chose to focus on object-oriented, exploratory programming environments, first in academia, then in industrial research laboratories. Meanwhile, the world around me, the context, changed profoundly: computers because so much cheaper that cycles and programmers proliferated, communication because so much cheaper that computing because distributed, transistors became so much smaller that battery-powered devices became important in our lives. As a result, ahead-of-time, statically-compiled, statically-typed, languages with first-class support for immutable data, functions, closures, and statically-defined generic computations gained in importance. I was slow to see it, but the industrial context of my work eventually gave me a nudge.

What do you take for granted about the present that might change in the future?

Speaker’s Bio:

Until recently, David was a researcher, enjoying U.C. Berkeley, Stanford, Sun Labs, and IBM. Now, he is happily contributing to the development of Swift at Apple. David has influenced the design and implementation of object-oriented languages, reflection architectures, programming environments, and animation techniques for IDEs. None of his papers has won an award when published, but four of them have won awards for lasting impact after a decade or two. David has been honored with the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Senior Prize for outstanding career contributions