I occasionally use IRC, and Colloquy is my preferred client. The default theme is OK, but not great. Recently, I stumbled upon a Colloquy theme that is based on 37signals’ Campfire chat application. It makes the Colloquy chat windows much easier to read, in my opinion.

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Following up on my earlier post, GitHub is now officially live (hat tip: Ruby Inside). So, what are you waiting for, got host some code!

Be sure to checkout GitHub’s Guides, including the list of cool and unusual Git techniques. Finally, the aforementioned Ruby Inside post also pointed out this Ruby and Git roundup at InfoQ.

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Git seems to have gained a lot of traction lately. Just last week the Ruby on Rails core team announced that they are moving the official Rails source repository to Git. The core team took a lot of flak for the move, but I think it is a good one.

Rails will be hosted on the […]

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You ask and I deliver. Mark asked for a screenshot in a comment to my original post on Darcheology. So, here it is:

(Click the image to see a larger version)

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While doing some Smalltalk related research, I ran across this announcement on Smalltalk.org from last October:

Fellow Smalltalkers, I have had a conference call with representatives of INCITS and it seems that getting the process restarted to revise the ANSI standard for Smalltalk is very doable. […]

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I have used darcs for about 2 years now and have been generally very pleased. One thing that has been missing is a good GUI tool for visualizing changes and managing your repository. Today John Clayton announced the availability of his Darcs repository explorer, Darcheology, as open source.

John has been working on Darcheology for a […]

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This is a short followup to my post on Java’s decline. One of the issues brought up in the comments is that Java as a platform potentially has more staying power than Java the programming language. The JVM is a solid foundation for building languages on, so the argument goes, and a new language […]

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I wrote last month about the decline of the Java programming language in a post called Stop the Insanity. The gist of the post is that the Java language has stagnated and this stagnation will eventually lead to a decline in popularity. I felt that this was a fairly uncontroversial idea; programming languages follow cycles […]

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Russell Beattie makes a pretty good argument that Java needs an overhaul. For the most part, I can’t argue with what he is saying. The Java language needs to come to grips with the changing ways that people write software and provide a more productive platform on which to build. This isn’t something that can […]

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There is a good article running over at SD Times titled “Study Predicts Upswing In Dynamic Language Use” (hat tip to James Robertson). Given how hot dynamic languages are right now I don’t think it would take Nostradamus to predict an upswing in use. The Forrester study mentioned in the article did have a few […]

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