SD Magazine: R.I.P.

Oh well. The writing had been on the wall, but today it's official: Software Development magazine, which I founded in 1992, has been absorbed by Dr. Dobb's Journal and will cease publication. Ironically, SD was born when Dr. Dobb's absorbed Computer Language after Miller Freeman (now CMP) bought DDJ. Between …

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Turing Award winner announced

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ACM just announced that this year they are giving the Turing Award to Peter Naur for his pioneering award on the Algol 60 programming language.[ *Via* ]{style="color:navy"}Kevin Schofield 

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Oscars, Sopranos, & Babylon 5

Having just watched "Junebug" (so far, my favorite movie released in 2005, but Hawaii being what it is, I haven't yet seen some others that I expect to like a lot), we were reflecting on how over-rated "Crash" is. At this point, if you want to see characters that have …

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Wikipedia is ripe for AI Exploitation

Researchers have already begun using Google to help with AI tasks. For instance, if you search Google for two words, you can get a sense of their relatedness by comparing the relative number of links returned (e.g., "cat and dog" vs. "cat and politics"

Wikipedia is an even greater …

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C# & VB: Peer Pressure vs. Random Walk

Programming language popularity is a fascination of mine and has been since (at least) I joined "Computer Language" magazine "back in the day." Note that this is a different fascination than programming language capability, which goes all the way back to the time I read my Dad's copy of "Computer …

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Smalltalkers sneer at my LINQ-thusiasm

James Robertson thinks that I'm too breathless about LINQ in my recent article about C#'s popularity on the CLR. For some reason, I can't post to his comment section, so I'll just respond here and shoot him a trackback:

What got through the asbestos was the comment that I …

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Origami: Textbook viral marketing

Apparently, "it's been pretty much established as fact that Origami is a new "ultramobile lifestyle PC" from Microsoft."

This fits a couple other data points, but we'll just have to see. One way or the other, though, whoever organized this "mystery" sure earned their pay. I suspect that 90% of …

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The myth of better programming languages

I like Andy Hunt, and I like Ruby, but his post at perpetuates a myth that I think is harmful. He says of Ruby, "First, more than any other language I've used, it stays out of your way. You don't have to spend any effort 'satisfying the compiler'.... I can …

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