Finding Patterns: From Middleware to Modern AI

An airhacks.fm conversation with Prof. Dr. Michael Stal ( /in/drstal/ ) about: writing a Star Trek Basic game from memory after a context reset, the Z80 chip and assembly programming via a disassembly and debugging monitor, buying Turbo Pascal directly from a Munich garage 500 meters from home, studying computer science with C and Turbo Pascal , building a functional interpreter for a compiler generator with visual UI at university, joining Siemens for a research project, working on the C++ standardization proposal for meta-information and reflection through source-code instrumentation, the influence on the C++ ISO standard, the path to writing the POSA (Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture) book in 1996 in parallel with the Gang of Four book, coordinating with Erich Gamma to avoid overlap, finding patterns in middleware platforms like COM, DCOM, CORBA , and RMI rather than inventing them, broker , microkernel , pipes and filters , blackboard , layers, publisher-subscriber, forwarder-receiver, client-dispatcher-server, and whole-part patterns, learning Java from Java in a Nutshell by David Flanagan, skepticism about Java replacing C++ that proved wrong, Java Competence Centers at Siemens and Sun Microsystems , Java mobile edition for handsets and the rise of enterprise Java, Siemens application server limited to stateless EJBs, embedded systems at Siemens written in C++ and rust for ICE trains and medical tomographs, Java for enterprise services and monitoring, LLM disillusionment on the Gartner hype cycle , the plateau in transformer-based models, the brute-force compute investment vs specialized models, AGI skepticism rooted in transformer architecture limits and missing context memory and consciousness, physical AI cooperation between Nvidia and Siemens, the n times square root of n attention scaling, the practical context window limits below the advertised million tokens, errors during code generation with Claude Sonnet 4.5, the keep-it-simple principle and Occam's Razor , simplicity as an art, the role of naming, applying patterns to existing systems rather than coding them as building blocks , over-abstraction of HTTP behind custom adapters as an anti-pattern, Convention over Configuration in Quarkus with JAX-RS and Model Context Protocol annotations, grounding LLMs with publicly available Java and Jakarta EE specifications written in normative RFC 2119 language, the Ivar Jacobson BCE (Boundary Control Entity) structure as a stable scaffolding for code generation, vibe coding limited by specification coverage Prof. Dr. Michael Stal on LinkedIn: /in/drstal/

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Finding Patterns: From Middleware to Modern AI is an episode from airhacks.fm podcast with adam bien by Adam Bien.

This episode is 00:59:44 long.

This episode was published on May 15, 2026.

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