A team, unaccustomed to but enthusiastic about moving towards agile methodologies, begins an important project. The project has many facets and a number of strong developers, so it seems natural for the developers to concentrate on a single aspect: Adam is associated with the Widget feature, Barbara focuses on the …

Not counting Geek Acres, the best 100% Kona coffees were available for tasting during the annual Coffee Stroll.

Tina and I both agreed on the top 3:

1. Mr. Bean: Complex, bright, great mouthfeel, clean finish -- everything you could want in a coffee.
2. Sugai: Super mellow and round with a clean …

One of the emerging themes at this conference is the need to move “examples” (and their older siblings, scenarios and use-cases) “into the code,” so that examples/stories/scenarios/use-cases, which are tremendously meaningful to the subject-matter experts, are actually traceable directly into the code, which is tremendously meaningful to …

One of the emerging themes at this conference is the need to move “examples” (and their older siblings, scenarios and use-cases) “into the code,” so that examples/stories/scenarios/use-cases, which are tremendously meaningful to the subject-matter experts, are actually traceable directly into the code, which is tremendously meaningful to …

RIP John McCarthy. Truly one of the greats in our field.

This is Dart:

[sourcecode lang="JavaScript"]
main() {
try{
var x = 'foo';
int s = x;
print('Shirley, you are joking');
}catch(var e){
print('Surely this will be executed.');
}
}
[/sourcecode]

Note that I've declared s to be of type int and, just to make sure the point is clear, have assigned …

I should hope so.

This was the afternoon’s first major talk. David Ungar from IBM Research first demonstrated that the tragedy of Romeo & Juliet comes from a race condition (if only he had waited for news from the Friar).

That was excellent, but the real premise of his talk …

Perl users in our study performed notably poorly... no better than a language designed largely by chance.

They mean this literally, having used in their study a language called “Randomo”:

With the exception of braces, the lexical rule for variable names, and a few operators (e.g., addition, subtraction, multiplication …

I think when people saw that Dart was from Gilad Bracha and Lars Bak there was an expectation that Dart was going to be a grand synthesis: a blazingly-fast NewSpeak-with-curly-brackets. It’s very much not such a language. It doesn’t seem, academically, vastly innovative because it doesn’t add …

Gilad Bracha started the day’s Dynamic Languages Symposium with an invited talk on Dart, a new Web programming language (read: JavaScript replacement) in which “Sophisticated Web Applications need not be a tour de force.”

OOPSLA is attended by academics, who are typically less interested in the surface appearance of …