Example of Surprising Closure Behavior

::: {style="font-size: 10pt; background: white; color: black; font-family: courier new"} What do you expect to be outputted from this program (note that line 19 captures the outer variable "i")?

[    1]{style="color: #2b91af"} [using]{style="color: blue"} System;

[    2]{style="color: #2b91af"} [using]{style="color: blue"} System.Collections.Generic;

[    3 …

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The Myth of Elite Programmer Employment

James Robertson, advocating that people give 1-3 elite Smalltalkers a chance to take on a project that would take "commodity" programmers 6 months, says "Which will cost you more: Those two "cowboys", or the 10 "commodity" developers? Heck, let's say you find yourself 2 really good people, and pay them …

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$170M FBI Software Failure: 730KLoc * $232.88 / line

\\(170,000,000 / 730,000 = \\)232.88.

Choice "incompetent software project management" quotes:

"[T]he FBI made a fateful choice: It wanted SAIC to build the new software system from scratch rather than modifying commercially available, off-the-shelf software. Later, the company would say the FBI made that decision independently; FBI …

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Java May Get Closures: Functional Programming on the March!

Gilad Bracha has a substantive proposal to add closures to Java (for those familiar with .NET but not Java, this is generally equivalent to adding delegates and C# 2.0's anonymous delegates). The proposal has slightly cleaner syntax than what is in C# but I believe would reprise an issue …

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Eric Sink Says Nice Things About Me

Eric Sink, who among other things wrote "The Business of Software," says I seem to "really understand both technology and business at a deep level." Me? Understand business? Lord, no! The industry, I pay attention to, but I'm an insanely bad businessman. I've flirted with personal bankruptcy, been a VP …

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Windows VPN breaks FTP?!?!?!?!

It isn't just Windows LiveWriter that got broken when I added a VPN connection, it's FTP! Un-be-freakin'-lievable.

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VPN breaks Windows LiveWriter

I hooked up to a client site via VPN yesterday and broke Windows LiveWriter. At first, it asked if I wanted to dial a connection to the VPN target. No, of course not (never mind the whole "dial" aspect"). Then, when I deleted the VPN, LiveWriter started producing a "file …

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SD Times Columnists Disagree On Ruby

Allen Holub's latest Java Watch column for SD Times says that Ruby is "certainly not" the next big thing in programming languages. He says "scripting systems (I'm reluctant to call them languages) like PHP and Ruby, ... are too Wild West to be trustworthy."

My Windows and .NET Watch column for …

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XNA Game Studio: Return of the Demo Scene?

I'm thrilled that Microsoft is opening up game development to non-professionals. I believe that the destruction of a steady path from enthusiast to power-user to programmer was one of the great tragedies of the 1990s. But the idea that XNA will be "YouTube of video games," conflates "point videocamera at …

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21,000 out of 51,400,000: Not Bad

That tail must be l-o-o-o-n-g indeed...

BTW, so here I am in the 99.96 percentile and my AdSense revenue is enough to buy a few lattes per month. Blogging is a marketing cost, not a direct income generator.

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