nice playing thought ping pong again, brian ;)

it's reflection? i thought that's the problem of journalism; maybe of any profession to look beyond one's own nose. can you be more precise? what's needed: a reflective mood towards the machine, human; crunching power, interface; glueing, talking, walking together; what brings stars into the eyes or makes them cloud?, ...

too many interpretations possible for my taste, leading me to reflectometer, reflexology,reflux,... reforestation.

i think he meant reflection in virtual machines, programming languages and the programmers individual and collective minds.

Consider: Anders Heijlsberg seems to understand reflection better than James Gosling. How will this influence the development of and with C# as opposed to Java. Heijlsberg though's got difficult heritage on his side. Hundreds of thousands of VB programmers. What will those learn? Will "ausgerechnet" VB guys learn about the least understood thing?

Bertrand Meyer of Eiffel fame like he did about Cobol people would have said: Shoot them, they're no good anyway. I say lets wait and see. Since I did my first automated direct from host to web translator with a 59 years old Cobol programmer in Cobol I give respect where respect is do. The guy did not learn Helma anymore, though he tried, but that was ok, cause making it not easy for one with a different cultural set is the greatest weakness of helma.