Recently in Technical Stuff Category
For once, I think Joel is wrong -- see this excellent followup by Henri Sivonen.
Today starts a new chapter of my life. After a year of hard work my team and I are coming out of stealth mode and launching a new company: Good Data Corporation.
We’ve built a complete, on-demand business intelligence platform combining analytics, reporting, data warehousing and data integration. Our primary focus is collaborative analytics. We believe that sharing and teamwork will allow our users to move past isolated reports and arrive at the true meaning of “business intelligence.”
How is it different? It’s fast, it’s flexible, and it’s on-demand. We’ve packed a sophisticated bundle into a simple package. By focusing on the right features, we’ve eliminated feature bloat. And it’s secure, too.
I have good reason to be sure that this is going to be a big disruption in the BI market.
[W]e also know that static types are just metadata. They’re a specialized kind of comment targeted at two kinds of readers: programmers and compilers. Static types tell a story about the computation, presumably to help both reader groups understand the intent of the program. But the static types can be thrown away at runtime, because in the end they’re just stylized comments. They’re like pedigree paperwork: it might make a certain insecure personality type happier about their dog, but the dog certainly doesn’t care.
Long, but well worth the time, as usual.
I continue to think the trend towards treating the RDBMS as a dumb indexed filesystem is rather ridiculous.
I couldn’t agree more — while an RDBMS is certainly not applicable in every situation, I believe that in >95% of all cases other options are simply not worth the hassle.
So the big news today, at least for some small community of the initiated, is the release of a first version of Arc, Paul Graham’s LISP dialect that many people waited for. I’ve seen some mixed reactions:
[R]ight now it’s not really convincing as an alternative to CL or Scheme itself. Don’t construe this as a harsh criticism towards Arc, it is not. We are talking about a language that it’s in its infancy and that as I said, I plan to experiment with myself. I hope to see it grow rapidly and I congratulate Graham and his team for finally making it available. That said, right now I think it’s a weak release and therefore, in my opinion, the disappointment of many is justified. In any case, good luck Paul, we’ll watch this one closely.
The most disturbing critique — regarding Graham’s decision to not implement Unicode — comes from Aristotle Pagaltzis:
Getting character strings right, however, is something that you really do need to get right at the core language level. You cannot leave it for libraries to fix.
After a quick glance at the tutorial, the most intriguing bit seems to be the support for macros, which work (almost) like function definitions. Interesting, but nothing that gets me overly excited.
Sean McGrath thinks one needs to keep an eye on it. I agree.
Ted Neward wrote about the Lang.NET symposium (sounds like something I would have loved to attend). This quote seems exactly spot on:
Looking at both languages like F# and Scala, for example, we see a definite hybridization of both functional and object languages, and it doesn’t take much exploration of C#’s and VB’s expression trees facility to realize that they’re already a half-step shy of a full (semantic or syntactic) macro system, something that traditionally has been associated with dynamic languages.
I agree, I’ll just note that the fact that these features now become part of the mainstream means any language that doesn’t have them will feel severely limited. And it seems to me that it’s awfully hard to bring all of these features together in a way “normal” people can understand if you throw in a real type system.
Mark Pilgrim is just great:
There are not hordes of fed-up consumers rejecting Apple’s vision of cryptographic lock-in. There are not mass graves where people ceremoniously dump their crippled, non-general-purpose computing devices. Outside of Planet Debian and my own personal echo chamber, nobody gives a shit about Freedom 0.
You knew this, of course, but I just wanted to let you know that I knew, too.
Just to ensure nobody accuses me of being an Apple fanboy: Apple is just as “evil” as Microsoft, or Google, or any other large corporation. For me personally, it’s just that it isn’t evil enough yet to outweigh the advantages.
Io is a dynamic prototype-based programming language. The ideas in Io are mostly inspired by Smalltalk[1] (all values are objects), Self (prototype-based), NewtonScript (differential inheritance), Act1 (actors and futures for concurrency), Lisp (code is a runtime inspectable / modifiable tree) and Lua (small, embeddable).
According to Why the lucky stiff,
Io is just an incredibly hushed secret. (Perhaps because it is impossible to Google stuff about it.) Did you know that Io’s introspection and meta tricks put Ruby to serious shame? Where Ruby once schooled Java, Io has now pogoed.
This sounds like fun.
Microsoft’s Doug Purdy is looking for new co-workers:
We are looking for developers/testers to build a tool that I will roughly describe as “Emacs.Net”.
Just enough type system theory to get by in real-world discussions - via Reg Braithwaite.