Mort/Elvis/Einstein: The Humpty Dumpty Personae

There's been a rash of criticism about Microsoft's Mort/Elvis/Einstein personas. A few months ago, I swiped at M/E/E and triggered some correspondence. Part of that was the surprising lack-of-results for a search for a document that defines the Mort/Elvis/Einstein personas! One certainly justifiable criticism …

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David Intersimone on DevCo, the viability of Delphi, and Turbo Ruby

I just got off the phone with David Intersimone. My recent SD Times column on "DevCo," (the codename for the spin-off of Borland's languages and database teams) ruffled some feathers, particularly when I described the Delphi language as "well past its peak, and with its Pascal roots ? on the wrong …

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Fucking Shit

We just found out that the fucking margins on Tina's second fucking lumpectomy aren't clear, meaning that she either has to get another fucking lumpectomy or a fucking mastectomy. Total fucking shit. And today's our fourteenth fucking wedding anniversary.

This is the type of situation for which I keep swearing …

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Learning to Program

John Montgomery wonders what would be good non-traditional ways to learn to program (where "traditional == text-based tutorial"). This is a subject dear to my heart and I started to write a post, but it looks like that's turning into an article, so here I'll just make the observation that the …

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LaPlante leaving Microsoft, Replaced by Outsider Andrew Kass

Rick LaPlante, who was largely responsible for Microsoft's strategic embrace of Application Lifecycle Management and the "super-sizing" of the IDE into VSTS, is leaving Microsoft and turning over the keys to Andrew Kass. Kass is most recently SVP of Product Development at an Atlanta company called S1 that "delivers customer …

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Sun Pops Stack: Turnaround Unlikely

Scott McNealy, co-founder and long-time CEO of Sun, is stepping aside in the wake of a miserable financial quarter, elevating Jonathan Schwartz to the top spot at the company. "Stepping aside" may be a euphemism for "shown the door" by a frustrated board, but my take is that, directionally, there …

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Notes on Sharks, Written While Waiting for My Wife to Emerge from Cancer Surgery

With sharks, there is no theme music. Between Hollywood and The Discovery Channel, you can become familiar with sharks: their grace, their lethality, their cartilaginous skeletal systems. An actual encounter, as far as detail or knowledge goes, is largely superfluous. The sinuous way they move and the apparent lack of …

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Lang.NET Conference: Seattle, Here I Come!

Microsoft is hosting the The .NET Programming Languages And Compilers Symposium in August. 10 minute lightning talks on type systems, domain-specific languages, and code generation? Oh, you know I'm going.

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Continuations in Mono: Good News for Language Implementors

According to Miguel de Icaza, Mono, the cross-platform implementation of the .NET CLR, now has continuations thanks to the work of Tomi Valkeinen. The work is here. Continuations are significant to a number of programming languages that have been hard to implement on the CLR. Valkeinen's work may help a …

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