我与Brian Kernighan的通信

那天听了Brian Kernighan的讲座，心里很高兴，晚上给他写了一封信，第二天（昨天）Brian就回了我。计算机界的顶尖人物其实有时候也很平易近人。下面刊登我和他的信件。
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Dear Prof. Kernighan:
I am a graduate student in Computer Science & Engineering Department of Lehigh University. I enjoyed your lecture today and gave me a lot of enlightenment.Firstly, I found two significant examples to show that Javascript is powerful also outside the browser. See http://www.mozilla.org/hacking/coding-introduction.html#cppjs .You can find this sentence :" When you start the application, the C/C++ components start first. But in an early stage, a technology called XPConnect gets initialized that enables the use of interpreted JavaScript at runtime. In fact, a Mozilla browser distribution consists of both compiled C++ and uncompiled JS files. " So infact Mozilla Firefox is built on C++ and Javascript!Another technology which is quite new is Adobe Air. They want to use HTML and Javascript to build desktop applications. See http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/develop_ajax.html .

Secondly, I have one question:I found that some companies have tried to combine or intergrate desktop programming and web programming together. They want to continue to use the powerful of strong-type programming languages to do web programming. For example, with new Microsoft .NET 3.0, you can create an application that both can run in desktop environment and also in a browser. Later, they launched a product named 'Silverlight' in order to get C# ( a strong-type programming language in some sense) programs run in a browser. How do you comment this trend? Do you think that combing desktop programming and web programming together is a right way?Thank you very much. Looking forward for your reply.
～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～～
hi, liangjie --
thanks for your note. i think that javascript will increasingly beuseful outside of browsers. i know very vaguely about adobe air, but nomore than that; it's clearly time to dig deeper. google gears isanother effort to do offline web computation. but i think that both ofthem are using javascript in the browser, not as a standalone language.no matter what, that's something i need to know more about.

microsoft has done several things that make it easier to create anapplication standalone and then convert it into something that runs in abrowser. my (limited) undestanding of ASP is that it does somethinglike this. i haven't tried anything like this in the new versions of.net, but i believe that things work as you describe. and certainlysilverlight is trying to things similar to air and gears. (i couldprobably give a talk on weird names for products.) i'm very poor atpredicting the future, but i do think that there will be a lot ofactivity in this area and that in the long run the lines between web anddesktop will be blurred.
brian
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Kernighan还是觉得Desktop和Web的界限会越来越模糊的。我自己对这个领域十分有信心，也感到自己应该做点什么了。