Microsoft has posted version 1.1.13.8 (whatever the heck that means) of their F# compiler, which gives me an excuse to discuss the book Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith.

Practical OCaml is a new release from APress. My favorite technical book of last year was Practical Common Lisp …

This post is attempting to measure the speed with which a blog post can propagate across the blogosphere. Feel free to link to it.

Here's a good pattern to use when you have a domain object that combines non-varying and time-varying data. Perrin's modified the original pattern to use generics: a good choice. (Why is it a good choice? Because objects that combine these two types of data are usually conceived of in a …

If you're looking for the perfect Christmas gift for a geek and your budget is around \$1800, this reproduction of the kit that started it all would be perfect.

A few days ago was launched the biggest, most experienced, development tools company to be created since the dot-com era. A company that's explicitly turning away from managerial buzzwords in order to concentrate on language implementations, libraries, and tool-chains that will cross platforms. The company includes people who developed some …

There was a short piece on the news last night about a \$540M travel reservation system developed to aid the Department of Defense manage their travel costs (in peacetime). Apparently, it doesn't work (doesn't deliver low fares) and even if it did work, it would take 20 years of projected …

SD Times has a newsfeed. Huzzah! Subscribed.

A client relying on a 3rd party service which we had been assured was available received an email today that said "[The service] is in a stop sell mode at this time as we are evaluating etc."

I'm going to have to remember that the next time I approach a …

TeX and METAFONT have version numbers that asymptotically approach ? and e. This reflects Don Knuth's decision that it's more important to create consistency with those tools than to add features. I've thought about something similar with programming language design: languages like Java and C# were very "teachable" in their …

The new spinoff from Borland, CodeGear, is strongly hinting that they will produce at least one dynamic language:

CEO Ben Smith: "We're also working on plans that can help developers take advantage of growing and emerging areas like web services, Ruby, Python and Ajax. "

David I: "We are not limited …