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 . 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 that […]

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I wrote last month about the decline of the Java programming language in a post called . 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 and it […]

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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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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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