Mitch Walker provides an excellent screencast showing the use of components within XNA GSE. However, looking at it I kept thinking "Shouldn't this be a domain-specific language"? I have to be careful here because, obviously, drag-and-drop designers have proven to be successful. But using the design surface as nothing but …
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from Kathy Sierra via John Lam
more ...The September 1st issue of SD Times contains two opinions on Ruby, "It Isn't All A Gem," by Andrew Binstock and my "Crossing the Chasm." Allen Holub's column "Just Say No to XML" is also provocative. As usual, surface disagreements belie underlying agreements: there is nothing that either Andrew or …
more ...I've abused Jeff Atwood's comments section enough, but I want to continue ranting about multicore machines.
One of the themes in his comment section is that games don't speed up on multicore machines. This is largely true. Jeff points out, correctly, that most games are video-processor bound and not CPU-bound …
more ...Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror, says that "the benefits of moving to quad core and beyond are less clear." He produces some numbers to reveal that many of today's processor-intensive applications (media, gaming, databases, etc.) are not multithreaded and, therefore, do not run significantly faster on multicore machines. He observes …
more ...The blog is too cluttered with marketing-speak, but the accompanying 22-minute video is very good in conveying what "Project Glidepath" is about: guidance (including, but not just code templates) for "MicroISVs" (1-10 person SD teams), integrated into the IDE. Too much "software factory" talk has been very rarified; it's nice …
more ...The first two versions of Enterprise JavaBeans had a crucial problem: "enterprise" objects had a life-cycle different than that of "plain old Java objects." Types were loaded differently, instantiated differently, and the rules for them going away were different. The justification boils down to "things are different over the network …
more ...John Montgomery's revelation that the most commonly used languages of non-professional programmers are HTML, JavaScript, and C++ is worth reflecting on.
First, let's just state the obvious: HTML without JavaScript isn't a programming language, and few people are using Rhino or what-have-you to explore JavaScript as a standalone language, so …
more ...Eric Gunnerson, discussing "Why so many languages?" makes the key point that "Compactness and simplicity have big benefits as well in programming languages."
Once upon a time, I made a good living teaching Java. Sometimes I taught it to C and C++ developers, sometimes I taught it to COBOL developers …
more ...What with all the talk about language directions, I was thinking about a hobbyhorse of mine that spreadsheets are proven to be something that a lot of people "get" and that it behooves language designers to pay attention to them. Usually, I speculate about a spreadsheet-like development environment, but in …
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