I second Andrew Binstock's recommendation of "The Definitive ANTLR Reference" by Terence Parr (author of ANTLR), even to Binstock's sly observation that the book "sort of lulls you into the false belief that you could write a new scripting language fairly easily."

I really like ANTLR. Not long ago, I …

My first reaction to the book xUnit Test Patterns: Refactoring Test Code by Gerard Meszaros (Addison-Wesley) was shock: 800 pages on writing unit tests? Isn't that taking things a little too far?

I have a problem calling such an omnibus a "patterns" book. At 800 pages, xUnit Test Patterns is …

Mark my words.

Update: A "friend" reminds me that I predicted that the end would be Christopher killing Tony. Yeah, so obviously David Chase reads my blog and does things just to make me look stupid. But the ending's in the can, so I'm sticking with my prediction.

P.S …

If there were 3 tools that I could wish every programmer would develop one complete project in, they would be:

• jUnit
• Smalltalk
• Mathematica

Each will forever change your opinion of what a software development environment ought to be like but each, at the level of an article or a blogpost …

I am going to be the happiest freaking kid on the block if this post appears on my blog at 6PM tonight and not before...

The ability to schedule posts for future publishing is my single greatest wish for Windows LiveWriter. It looks like the new beta has that capability …

In comments, David Glassborow makes the excellent point that the hard drive, far more than the CPU, seems to be the limiting factor for the concurrent revolution. When your computer is frustratingly slow, the odds of your disk-access light being on are approximately perfect.

I know very, very little about …

I know people love Skype, but my experience using it from Hawai'i has always been terrible -- horrid echo, constant break up -- and on my recent trip to Panama, it was equally useless for calling to Hawai'i. That's all I have to say about that.

Jeff Atwood has complained about the "compilation tax" that he must pay with C#, contrasting it with Visual Basic's background compilation. It's utterly absurd that when we program, the most sophisticated, well-studied, computational task that is common, we are essentially typing into a text buffer. (At least IntelliSense / method completion …

Alan Zeichick is understandably proud that the June 1, 2007 issue of SD Times is the largest in the paper's 7-year history. Launched as the dot-com bubble was deflating, SD Times has managed to thrive and now has more articles, more readers, and more advertisers than ever. That's quite an …

John Lam reports that:

2) Miguel de Icaza spent a bunch of time lobbying us for a XamlReader.LoadFromJson() API. His reasoning was that folks don't like to type XAML, and would prefer a more wrist-friendly syntax for generating WPF/S element trees. It would be interesting to hear some …