TeX and METAFONT have version numbers that asymptotically approach ? and e. This reflects Don Knuth's decision that it's more important to create consistency with those tools than to add features. I've thought about something similar with programming language design: languages like Java and C# were very "teachable" in their …
more ...The new spinoff from Borland, CodeGear, is strongly hinting that they will produce at least one dynamic language:
CEO Ben Smith: "We're also working on plans that can help developers take advantage of growing and emerging areas like web services, Ruby, Python and Ajax. "
David I: "We are not limited …
more ...In comments, Sun's Charles Nutter hints that JRuby may ship by the end of year. Or he may be taking a swipe at the Perl 6 guys: you decide. Ruby on at least one of the two major managed platforms: huge for Ruby. (In that post, I caution that it …
more ...Dr. Dobb's Journal has taken over the Jolt Awards now that Software Development is no more. Once again I'll be judging and, actually, serving as Moderator of the Development Environments and Languages category.
Given that we considered VS2005 last year (but, hey!, XNA) and given that Callisto is certainly going …
more ...Bill de h?ra's post on the language's he's used in the past year contains the provocative thought "...some people are looking at things like HTTP and Ant and CSS and wondering whether they are really programming languages....[T]hey are either replacing or reducing the raw coding I used …
more ...I don't do a lot of database work, I believe in rendering unto the DBA that which is the DBA's. But ya got's to pay the bills, so I've been doing some refactoring work on a database. While flirting with RedGate's SQL Dependency Tracker, I finally figured out how to …
more ...My very favorite technical book of last year was Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp. APress has recently released Practical OCaml by Joshua Smith. OCaml is the language implemented by F# (I don't know if F# is super- or sub-set -- perhaps the book will clarify).
I doubt that lightning will strike …
more ...I've been writing an article about software brittleness and found myself asking a question I can't answer: Why was there so little software chaos in January 2000? There really were hundreds of millions if not billions of lines of COBOL that were at least potentially vulnerable to the rollover bug …
more ...Patrick Logan says that some Schemers have put a Scheme on the Nintendo DS. Naturally, my first thought was "Hmmm... I wonder if I could do that with XNA?" (Or, more generally, if one could write a self-contained interpreter / compiler that would run on the XBox360). You could certainly do …
more ...John Lam, whose RubyCLR bridge has been a fascinating and seemingly highly-successful project, is joining Microsoft. Details are vague, but he says he'll "be working in the CLR team" and "I'm not going to leave the Ruby community" but makes it pretty clear that he's looking to hand off the …
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