Help yourself. SOB on programming languages: “This includes measuring your ability to generate tools for that language yourself.” Languages do not help those who do not help themselves. And I suggest you help yourself and read the rest of that post.
Life’s too short. Mark Kretschmann asks Why do we keep on using C++? “To summarize: Compiling is driving me nuts. I’ve wasted enough time for it in my life. Life’s too short to wait for a freaking compiler.” Now I remember why I switched to Java. I got tired of waiting for the damn build to finish, and Java’s half-compiler/half-interpreter was faster. Faster to build, and just fast enough to execute. That was 1995. Ten years later …
We can’t afford to have broken DRM. Bruce Schneier on quick to fix DRM: “trying to make digital files uncopyable is like trying to make water not wet.”
I see your IronPython and raise you a … Sun just hired Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo of JRuby fame. To quote Tim Bray, we’re getting some code, some religion, and hopefully some love: “Is Sun responding to hype? Yes, if by “hype†you mean a genuine groundswell of interest in the developer community; for example, check Tim O’Reilly’s book-sales data.”
The Wiki experiment. The question: will something magical happen if you take a technology that works in one context, and use it in another, to save that which has become obsolete? The answer: two letters, same as last time. Technologies are interesting, but incentives make things happen. Zoli has the story.