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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I recently acquired a new Santa Rosa based MacBook Pro to use as my daily development machine. This new laptop replaces my trusty 17” PowerBook G4 which was beginning to feel a little long in the tooth. I have been using the new machine for 2 or 3 days now and decided to offer my […]

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Matt and I were discussing domain-specific languages the other day and no discussion of DSLs is complete without mentioning Lisp macros. After I explained how macros work in Lisp Matt said something along the lines of “Huh, that sounds cool but I am not sure how I would use it.”

This is what Paul Graham called […]

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With the advent of multi-core CPUs concurrency is becoming more important, but is traditional threading the way to go? The problem is that traditional threading is very difficult to get right. I am sure that are some cowboys out there who will respond to that last sentence by saying that “real programmers” don’t have a […]

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My 7 year old Apple Pro keyboard died yesterday and I went to BestBuy to get a new one. All of the keyboards there were wireless and came with a mouse. Gone are the days when you can buy a simple wired keyboard. I don’t really care to have a profusion of novelty buttons on […]

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I noted the release of IronPython 1.0 last week and wondered if it would run under Mono on my Mac. Turns out the answer is yes.

Update: It looks like the Gardens Point Ruby.NET Compiler also works under Mono (mostly).

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In 2002 I led a team that was building a non-trivial system using .NET. Most of the code was written in C# with some low-level code written in C++ and a few legacy components implemented in VB 6. On that project we used several open source tools such as NAnt, NUnit and NDoc. Visual Studio […]

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Someone recently ran a benchmark comparing Rails to Django and Symfony and the posted the results on the Rails wiki. The gist of the benchmark is that the author created some dynamic content in all three frameworks and then used siege to hammer the server with 50 and then 150 concurrent users. At 50 users […]

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For those of you out there who need more evidence that WS-* is a confusing mess, I give you this.

‘nuff said.

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