Sean McGrath, CTO, Propylon

Sean McGrath's Weblog.

Saturday, August 23, 2003
    Ernie from tech support
Some strong language and robust metaphors in this standup piece by Ernie Cline. Suitable for those at either end of a tech support call in need of some light relief. [MP3]

posted by Sean 4:14 AM
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    Linguistic Simplicity
[via Artima] Linguistic simplicity.


posted by Sean 3:02 AM
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    Pssst. XML is not a good syntax for a programming language
Opinions differ of course. Each to his own but I find XML-based imperative programming awful with a capital A. Compare the two factorial functions on this page.
I'm mulling a future itworld article that I want to write on syntactic aesthetics. I believe that when it comes to syntax, "beauty" is a mini-endorphine rush nature gives you to re-inforce your brains opinion that what you are looking at is easy to grok with a good blend of expressive power and clarity.
Tag based programming languages, with angle-brackets sticking their arses in the air at every saccade, don't cut any endorphines loose for me.


posted by Sean 2:55 AM
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Friday, August 22, 2003
    More fuel to the fire - Dynamic languages and enterprise applications
In the Joel on software forum. Peter Breton says
"...I also get the sense that the companies don't think that this is 'a difference that makes a difference' ".
This is indeed a problem. I find translating it into dollars works well. Take a conservative figure of a factor of five increase in productivty and crunch the numbers. Companies who get it, who believe it, can hit the bottom line in a positive wa very quickly by incorporating dynamically typed/latently typed langauges like Python/Jython into their development processes. With a high focus on test driven development of course:-) Goes without saying right?


posted by Sean 2:07 AM
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    Test versus Type
Interesting piece about the whole tests versus types thing, a better classification system to get beyond the asinine, bludgenous, torpitude of "static versus dynamic". Oh, and a full and frank exchange of views in the comments :-)

posted by Sean 1:57 AM
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Wednesday, August 20, 2003
    NITF version 3.2
NIFT is one of those things that has been in my peripheral vision for a long time but I have not had the chance to look at it more closely. How does this sit with blogs/rss/peaw?

posted by Sean 3:25 AM
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    An RNC mode for Emacs
Thanks to Bill for a pointer to this RNC mode for Emacs.

posted by Sean 2:06 AM
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Tuesday, August 19, 2003
    Von Neumann's Curse
Some musings on parallelism and the embarrasment of computational power at our disposal - still largely untapped in my opinion - owing to a predisposition to think of processing as centralised. An E-Business in the Enterprise article.

posted by Sean 6:35 AM
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    Postel's Law and XML
Aaron claims that XML's draconian error handling violates Postel's Law and is bad.
I disagree. It's not that simple. When XML is used in a machine to machine context ("I'm sending this guys blood pressure figures to that machine over there") you definitely want draconian error handling. I don't want any machine making a stab at interpreting something that is bogus and cannot unambigously be turned into a DAG.
When XML is used in a human facing context (XHTML for example), draconian is, arguably, too draconian. The two cases have to be kept distinct IMHO.

posted by Sean 1:16 AM
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    RelaxNG compact syntax
"...this is the best syntax currently available for writing schemas for XML languages". Tim Bray.
No argument from here.

posted by Sean 1:01 AM
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Monday, August 18, 2003
    From the archives
I was young and clueless in 1995.


posted by Sean 12:29 PM
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    Transactional and persistent queue system for Python
munkware looks interesting.

posted by Sean 12:15 PM
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    OpenOffice Release Candidate 3 of 1.1
Now available at www.openofice.org.

posted by Sean 3:43 AM
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    So, you don't know your aswap from your lopix eh?
Then the XML acronym demystifier is for you.

posted by Sean 1:59 AM
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