Sony’s eReader

I was a huge fan of SONY for quite a long time.

I owned 3 SONY plam and 4 SONY MD.  However, you see what those products turned into?   And in fact, I was very disappointed by its product quality, given the result that 3 MDs got broken within 2 years.

This summer I bought a SONY e-Reader (b/c of a deal). We should admit that SONY is indeed a company with innovations.  It was as early as 2003 or 2002, when SONY started to produce eBook reader products.  That is much much earlier than other companies, even if Kindle is so hot recently.

However, after so long time’s development, its market was obtained by Kindle, even without too much resistance. Why?

According to my experience on eReader and those earlier products, I have some complaints:

1) Software sucks, I never seen any software as hard to use as SONY’s.   The software for MD was bad. And the current one for eReader is even worse. My god, SONY, you know what, I even prefer copy files to the reader manually, other than use the shabby slow sync software!!

2)quality still needs improvements…

3) International support on the products is too tooooooo  weak!

In fact, I don’t understand why SONY don’t take advantage of what it had done on Palm paltform,  why not combine eReader with CLIE Palm???   There are tons of 3rd party software there for CLIE, once SONY open the platform, I believe the success will the exceptionally huge.

About Functional Programming Language

I used to be very interested in Functional Programming Language (FPL). The major reason, is that I believe in, just like what most people do, FPL in the near future will boost the advances of parallel computing. I recommend this short introduction to functional programming, and its advantages. http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/fp.html.  This article has some interesting discussions about most of the merits that people believe FPL would bring us.

Unfortunately, in the past decades, FPLs like Lisp or Scheme, are mostly ONLY used in universities for academic educational purpose.  The most significant excuse for this fact, is that modern computers are built upon Turing machine computation model, while FPL stems from -calculus.

It looks like the situation in the industry is indeed changing nowadays. For example, twitter says they are using Scala in their system, which used to be partially based on Ruby.  Also, Microsoft’s 2010 Visual Studio is adopting a new function language F#[link].  I personally don’t like the stream line of the languages in Visual Studio (i.e. Visual J++, C#), not to mention it ruined one of my favourite tool … Delphi …  Anyway, It is easy to see that the industry tends to pay more attention to FPL, since such a large corp for the first time introducing FPL into their development packages.

Even if FPL would never become more popular in the programming language world, it is still the fact that many of its good properties/designs will be adopted by other modern imperative languages. For example, next release of Java, according to som e rumor, is adopting closure into its spec.

Thus I guess maybe a more reasonable future of programming languages will be mixing both functional language and imperative language.

Let us see what will happen in the future.

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