Wes Moise's musings on Supercompilation led me to this discussion of the the myth of the sufficiently smart compiler.

The "sufficiently smart compiler" is still trotted out regularly, even though the market has moved away from demanding even moderate attention to performance at the compiler level. Have you timed your …

"\<a href="http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/10/att-invents-pro.html%23comments"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">AT&T Invents Programming Language for Mass Surveillance" is Wired's absurdly bad headline describing how \<a href="http://www.research.att.com/%7ekfisher/hancock/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Hancock, "a C-based domain-specific …

\<a href="http://blog.notdot.net/archives/32-LOLCode.net-Now-your-LOLCats-can-use-the-CLR!.html"" target="_blank" atomicselection="true" rel="noopener noreferrer">

Is this a strictly true statement? 

"One can freely download command-line compilers for all Microsoft languages and never use Visual Studio."

Specifically, don't you need VS to develop for Smartphones and / or Windows Mobile?

With the release to public beta of Popfly, Microsoft's mashup editor, I'll reiterate my theory that mashups are the UNIX shell of the Internet. The corollary is that we need a suite of command equivalents:

Command Mashup Alternative cd, mkdir, rmdir facilities for manipulating "current URI"; REST principles, etc. mailx …

I'm tempted to label as "shocking" the announcement that F# will become a product fully integrated into Visual Studio, but I suppose it would be hard for anyone to ignore stuff as compelling as this. F# is a derivative of OCaml and is a functional programming language. Those who delve …

Yuriy Solodkyy demonstrates the \<a href="http://weblogs.asp.net/ysolodkyy/archive/2007/10/07/using-linq-with-system-reflection-classes.aspx"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">combination of LINQ and Reflection APIs, a technique which could prove to be tremendously powerful and which strikes me as allowing LINQ-enabled languages to have a level of …

Some d00d named Leppie has written a \<a href="http://xacc.wordpress.com/"" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Lisp for the DLR [via Jason Bock]

(HOTEL_BLOCK_RESERVATION(HOTEL_ID (IATA_NODE MDW) (PHONE_NUMBER 708 563 0200) (HOTEL_NAME Courtyard by Marriot)) (DAY_BLOCK (DATE_NODE 08 31 07) (FLIGHT_BLOCK (PAIRING_NODE (PAIRI... etc...

"VisitorTests.parsesTheWholeThing(): Lex & Parse: 2765 ms. ReservationCountWalker 282 ms. to find 27327 reservations"

Man, if I could just get …

Jon Skeet wonders:

I've been looking at C# 3 in a fair amount of detail recently, and likewise going over the features of C# 2....I feel sorry for someone wanting to learn C# 3 from scratch. It's becoming quite a big language....It's often been said in the newsgroups …