My initial reaction to this is fear that Sun will try to force things a little too hard. When I think of MySQL, I think of ease-of-use and reliability. When I think of SQL Server and Oracle, I think of the ancillary tools and the fierceness with which DBAs cling …

Actually, just a brief post. LINQ has injected into the mainstream a whole range of functional programming topics previously seen as esoteric. Putting aside the merits of each of them, the interesting dynamic to watch will be if these approaches generate a new sub-niche of programming. For instance, C++ templates …

In response to "No Silver Programmers," a commenter points out:

Say I'm a pretty good developer and there's this guy who is 5x worse than me, meaning it takes him a full work week to finish what i will finish in a day.

but then, what happens when it has …

Someone who should know better gave a commencement address based on the premise "5% of programmers are 20x more productive than the other 95%." This is utter BS and it's important to say so. First, as boring as it may be to say "we don't have the data," go to …

Tina was diagnosed with leukemia when she was 29 and we were newlyweds. Two years ago, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. I got home from a business trip to find out that her routine dental x-rays had led to a referral to a dental surgeon because two things might …

I was reading PC Magazine's 25th anniversary issue in which they have the evergreen "what will the future bring?" essays. I was struck by how much talk of medical stuff (nanobots, non-invasive diagnosis, ubiquitous this-and-that) there was. And then it struck me:

Boomers.

Just as they do with every damn …

When I can shake some time free to actually learn F#, this awesome series of blog posts on "Practical Parsing in F#" is definitely something I'll revisit. Parsing is one of the better tasks for shaking free a large number of concepts about a programming language, since it invariably involves …

When I was 10, this show was on Saturdays at 4:00 on UHF Channel 56. I watched the static-y, ghost-filled image on a black-and-white television with, I'd guess, a 17" screen that sat on a cheap aluminum rolling stand. I thought it was the greatest show ever. This weekend …

Raymond Chen's psychic debugging of a deadlock is everything you need to know about why the mainstream model of concurrency (in which programmer's manually manage locks and can start their own threads) is fundamentally broken.

If you're a C# or Java programmer looking at this code, you might be tempted …

For the past few years I've felt that Subversion was a "good enough" SCM system, but I am beginning to wonder about that. In practice, SVN hits bumps quite often, especially when doing things like moving files or directories. This is always easy enough for an experienced user to correct …