Money quote. M Easter explains JRuby by drawing on the wisdom of the WS-* crowds:
Define JVM Tunneling to be the phenomenon where certain languages, by running on the JVM, encounter ultra-low resistance as a proposed addition to a project or organization. The most successful JVM tunnelers are languages that compile to bytecodes and whose installations require the addition of a single jar to the classpath.
Abstracted away. Apropos WS-* and friends, David Lorge Parnas on the distinction between abstractions and lies:
Dijkstra’s definition allows us to distinguish between an abstraction and a lie. When a model makes assumptions that are not true of a real object (such as infinite memory), these assumptions are often defended by saying “It is an abstraction.” Using Dijkstra’s definition, such models are not abstractions. Rather than represent several things equally well, they represent nothing at all. Because they embody unrealistic assumptions, one cannot trust the conclusions that might be drawn from them.
Money quote, the second. Dare Obasanjo on the practice behind the theory behind the abstraction we call SOAP:
It’s sad that as an industry we built a technology on an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) and our first instinct was to make it as inflexible as technology that is two decades old which was never meant to scale to a global network like the World Wide Web.
Cool by obfuscation. Supposedly NEPOMUK, some sort of semantic thingy something, will be part of KDE 4. What’s NEPOMUK, you ask?
NEPOMUK intends to realize and deploy a comprehensive solution – methods, data structures, and a set of tools – for extending the personal computer into a collaborative environment, which improves the state of art in online collaboration and personal data management and augments the intellect of people by providing and organizing information created by single or group efforts.
Exactly! Not that I know what any of this means. All these bigs words are semantically ambiguous. Which is exactly why I’m so impressed. That which I can’t understand must be the next big thing!
Not by car. Just a reminder, today is Ride to Work Day.