I've noticed that wall street is taking a very clever tactic in what is clearly a critical PR battle - they are trying to associate anger against wall street with anger against wealth creators in general.

It's a great tactic, because Americans generally are not hostile toward very wealthy individuals when they perceive these individuals as wealth creators - in fact, they actually admire these people [1]. Yes, most support progressive taxation and would support higher taxes for the rich (even wealth creators whose activities we want to support), but they'd oppose a "soak the rich" kind of class warfare, on practical and moral grounds.

No surprise, then, that people who profited, first from risky and economically worthless activities [2], and next from a massive taxpayer supported bailout, would want to get real close to the founders of tech companies in silicon valley and hope that nobody notices the difference.

I'm not surprised that the movement against "wall street" is incoherent right now. There are so many angles, so many different opinions. You have the anarchists who protest globalization in general, but you also have Tim O'Reilly stating that he thinks wall street bankers got away with a crime [3] (and kept the money too).

As someone in high tech, the most important thing to me is to make sure that financial "engineers" don't get to associate themselves with the wealth creation of real engineers and other people who are wealthy because they created wealth.

[1] An interesting article about this in the nytimes titled "How we value the super rich" talks ab it about the mentality behind this distinction...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/28/weekinreview/28stone.html

[2] For a pretty comprehensive version of the argument that much of investment banking is useless, check out a New Yorker article "what good is wall street"...

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/11/29/101129fa_fact_...

[3] https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/Sy8Z2uWy...

From whatever little I see, I am already hating it :-) This looks like Java for Javascript, if that makes any kind of sense. We are in the year 2011, PL design has progressed so much since 1990 that such an anachronism is unpardonable. I sincerely wish that companies like Google focus on hiring the right kind of person for designing programming languages.

What is frustrating is that there are so many people who can do this job right, yet we are stuck with amateurish programming languages designed by companies like Google. Please try and hire people like Oleg Kiselyov, Simon Marlow, Erik Meijer or some one from the possible hundreds who have worked deep in PL theory for literally decades. On the face of it Gilad Bracha has great credentials, credentials that would make the HR folk happy but one look at some of the stuff he writes and we know things are not going to be good.

http://gbracha.blogspot.com/2011/06/types-are-anti-modular.h...

I think Phil Wadler gave him more respect than was due in the comments :-) Microsoft hired Anders Hejlsberg for .Net which I don't think was a good idea, he is a great engineer but not a PL theory expert. They however "rectified" the situation by hiring Erik Meijer later and his impact via LINQ and F# and improvements in C# is obvious. Not to say that Hejlsberg is not good, but Meijer is better. Getting back on track, I may be wrong but Dart makes me groan. It is one thing to design such a language in 1990, but quite another thing to do it in 2011.