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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[via Artima] Linguistic simplicity.

posted by Sean 3:02 AM

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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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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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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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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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Thanks to Bill for a pointer to this RNC mode for Emacs.

posted by Sean 2:06 AM

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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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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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"...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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I was young and clueless in 1995.

posted by Sean 12:29 PM

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munkware looks interesting.

posted by Sean 12:15 PM

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Now available at www.openofice.org.

posted by Sean 3:43 AM

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Then the XML acronym demystifier is for you.

posted by Sean 1:59 AM

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