Tina's fine

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.

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Sun Buys MySQL

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 …

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Kicking Around the Monads

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 …

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Bad Programmers Are Not Good Programmers Who Are Slow

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 …

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No Silver Programmers

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 …

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I'm Physically Sick With Fear

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 …

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Aging is the New Working

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 …

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Harry Pierson's Awesome "Practical Parsing in F#" Series of Posts

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 …

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