I imagine that every single person who reads this blog other than my sister (Hi Donna!) knows who Jon Udell is and knows that he is joining Microsoft. In the small world of "people who make their living by writing about software development," Jon is clearly the leading light on …

Paul... uh... NoLastName has an excellent post on silver bullets and functional programming. He cites studies, makes logical connections... why, it's hardly a blog post at all!

Anyway, I starting writing a comment, but it grew and grew, so I am posting it here instead. Read his post first....

You …

In comments to my previous post, Wesner Moise says:

• given today's components, "why build vi?";
• the difficulty arising from software state "is a solved problem in functional programming"; and
• suggests that the advances in graphics and networking that I'd acknowledged amount to a silver bullet.

I'm afraid he's missing the …

Wesner Moise quickly reviews Brook's "No Silver Bullets" assertion and claims "[t]hat assertion turns out to be pure nonsense, amply disproven by numerous advances in IDEs, languages, frameworks, componentization over the past few decades."

I couldn't disagree more. While the cumulative effects have given us more than an order …

\<a href="http://www.knowing.net/images/ComputersoftheAncientGeeks_74BC/image05.png"" atomicselection="true">Scientists have reverse engineered the Antikythera Mechanism, a sophisticated analog computer that was known to have calculated lunar phases and a luni-solar calendar. Newly reported is that it additionally calculated lunar and solar eclipses! Additionally, it may …

The always insightful Peter Coffee has a good new column that offers a couple contrarian observations. To the generally positive buzz over Cisco's new virtual meeting system (HD screens, lighting, surround-sound), Peter makes the skewering concession "If face-to-face meetings were considered the high point of organizational productivity, I'd endorse the …

Here's some interesting reading on the challenges of and possible strategies for dealing with exceptions in concurrent versions of C++. The try...catch...finally model of exception handling introduces its own control flow. How will that interact with concurrent models in which you're passing around a "future" (essentially, an IOU …

Intel's announcement of a laser-based chip is frickin' cool and, at the practical level, may be a big deal (beats me). But one thing that blows my mind every time I think about it is that light can only travel \~11.8 inches in a billionth of a second. And …

In comments, Daniel Crenna asked "What do you think of the Garden Point Ruby.NET compiler? If Microsoft supported this project financially, why do you think they didn't put together an in-house project similar to Jim's IronPython for the Ruby equivalent?"

I've swapped a couple emails with the GP guys …

Sun has hired Charles Oliver Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the two core JRuby developers with the charge of bringing JRuby to fruition.

I've held for a while now that the crucial step for Ruby to cross the chasm and become an "early majority" language was hosting / 100% transparent interop with …