I used to live several miles from Harvard Square, which was (a) a destination in and of itself and (b) the last stop on the Red Line (back in the day). I used to live about 5 minutes from the Belmont Center route, which ran occasionally, and about 15 minutes …

Mitch Barnett responds to \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/PermaLink%2cguid%2cfde0f610-3773-47b8-9be6-d6e5a8a76858.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">No Silver Programmers with a discussion of visual programming in BizTalk:

[Y]ou drag n dropped onto the canvas (kinda like Visio) and then you would set a bunch of design …

Philip Johnson tells me by email of Hackystat:

[A]n open source framework for collection, analysis, visualization, interpretation, annotation, and dissemination of software development process and product data....

Hackystat aspires to be the "Apache" of software engineering measurement systems: open source, standalone, scalable, extensible, and platform and technology neutral.

Our …

This is a photo by Wayne Levin, an incredible photographer who stars in a new video for Hawaiian tourism

While I'm at it, this is one Wayne took of Tina, bluewater freediving near a fish-aggregating buoy:

In email, Charles Gallo makes a point regarding "No Silver Programmers":

I think the HUGE difference between the mean programmer, and the silver bullet programmer is NOT how fast they can code "x" function points. The HUGE difference is when they sit down to solve a problem, and they can …

I'm now reading Dan Simmons' The Terror on my Kindle. He's a very competent writer, and perhaps it's his very slow, very claustrophobic build-up (which he'd d*** well better pay off) that makes it so noticeable, but I have to say that I'm very aware of a certain "running on …

Andrew Dalke reminded me of an essay by Stephen J. Gould (discussed at:

http://www.michaelshermer.com/1996/10/bicycles-baseball-bacteria-and-bach/ and http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/1997/01/outspoken.html) about the decreasing deviation in performance as a field matures. Relating it to the old studies on programming productivity …

Haskell is a language that is pretty hard to "just pick up" (especially if you are mostly familiar with mainstream, C-derived languages). Perhaps "Real World Haskell" by Bryan O'Sullivan, Don Stewart, and John Goerzen will help the language (much beloved in academia) increase in popularity.

In reaction to No Silver Programmers, several people have spoken to the compounding benefits of good programmers (or the compounding pain of bad programmers). This is an excellent point. I think it's best put in \<a href="http://www.valuedlessons.com/2008/01/garlic-programmers-for-silver-code.html"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer …

She's got to get a CT to confirm, but basically the Doctor told her "no problem." So ends probably the least-productive week of the past several years...

My sincere thanks to everyone who got in touch and kept us in your thoughts. It really helped.