Word: oak
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...MICROSYSTEMS HAD a problem on its hands. One of the company's brightest software developers had created a new computer-programming language called Oak that nobody seemed to want. Originally designed for writing control software for the computer chips that run microwave ovens and other state-of-the-art household appliances, it had been reconfigured several times over the past five years--for cable-TV set-top boxes, for video-game machines, for personal computer CD-ROMS. But every time it looked as if Oak might finally find a home, the deal somehow fell through. Even its name...
Making belly buttons was not what James Gosling had in mind in 1990, when he started work on the language he called Oak (after the tree outside his office window). The veteran programmer wanted to get the microprocessors inside consumer appliances (TVs, VCRs, car alarms) to talk to one another--a programming challenge that required writing software code that was not only highly compressed but also virtually idiot-proof. Most consumers, unlike most computer owners, don't expect their toaster ovens to "crash...
...Oak, or rather Java, went through its many revisions, some principles didn't change. It was to be a thoroughly modern programming language, embodying all the major advances in computer theory of the past quarter-century. It had to be "object-oriented," forcing programmers to write in small, self-contained units that could be slotted into one another like Lego blocks. It had to be robust, which is to say crash-proof, doing without many standard programming tools that give developers flexibility but can lead to unpredictable results. Finally, it had to be secure, even in the hostile hacker...
...fact, he was an artist of immense sophistication, the friend of Duchamp, Erik Satie, James Joyce and Ezra Pound. His work, with its flowing contours and obsessively refined surfaces, was one of the main sources for Art Deco style. Imagine the top of the Chrysler Building carved from oak, and you have something very like his sculptural bases. As Rowell points out in the catalog, guests in his Paris studio would be regaled with homemade sheep's milk cheese and a glass of iced champagne--funk and chic together, essential Brancusi. He loved contrasting the rough with the smooth...
Brancusi was after a healing wholeness. He didn't care about "truth to material," but he did strive to make the action of the hand and the movement of thought one. He believed that every aspect of sculpture--whether rough, like his urgently hewn oak and walnut carvings, or exquisitely nuanced, like his marble head or bird forms, polished to the point where light and substantial weight become mysteriously the same--needed to be manual before it could be whole...