Silverlight on Rails

Jonathan Edwards has a great piece of speculation.  Man, if John Lam has produced a native CLR Ruby (maybe based on the IronPython codebase) in 8 months, he'd be the run-away winner of this year's He-Man Programming Award.

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Ageism in Software Development

Benoit Lavigne wonders if ageism is a problem in the software development profession. Oh, hell yeah. From the minute I began editing software development magazines (when I was 25) I began hearing from professionals in their 40s and higher who faced disproportionate difficulty getting work. There is not a question …

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Map, Everything's An Object, and Inline

One of the reasons that functional programming is worth studying is that it abounds with opportunities for implicit parallelization. As Jon Harrop discusses in this post, the map function takes a function object f and an array [a, b, c, d] and returns [f(a), f(b), f(c), f …

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Pragmatic Programmers To Publish Erlang Book

The Pragmatic Programmers have a very good sense of software developmet trends -- they're doing today what O'Reilly did in the early 90s. Coming in July from them is Joe Armstrong's Programming Erlang. Erlang is seen by programming language mavens as one of the real contenders for the crown of "most …

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Perhaps We Need Something Other Than Silver Bullets

Of course, debates on the theoretical effectiveness of programming paradigms may be missing the point entirely, given the too-horrifying-to-be-true assertion that many programmer applicants cannot:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print "Fizz" instead of the number and for the …

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I, Werewolf?

My dispute with Wesner Moise continues...

\<a href="http://www.knowing.net/images/IWerewolf_716D/image02.png"" atomicselection="true"> I'm going to take this post with good humor -- the "werewolf" being a reference to the question of a silver bullet and an image in one of my responses. And the …

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Perceptive Pixels Multitouch: Pretty Much The Precrime Interface from Minority Report

This is a much more impressive video than the one from (Siggraph?) last year. The UI that Tom Cruise's character uses in Minority Report blew me away and this video, which demonstrates "multitouch" on a big screen (rear projection, I imagine), is amazingly similar. Of course, what they're showing may …

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I'm Interviewing D-Wave (Quantum Computer Guys): What Do Programmers Want To Know?

I'm arranging an interview with a VP at D-Wave, the quantum computer company. Any topics I should be sure to cover?

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Shocking if True: D-Wave Demos 16-Qubit Quantum Computer

Showing how clueless aggregator sites are, no one seems to be properly freaking out about the claims of D-Wave to be demoing a 16-qubit quantum computer with plans for a 1K-qubit computer within a year. CNet story here, straight link to company here.

The shocking thing about this is that …

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