A couple of plugs, with no ulterior motive, and a mildly philosophical musing.

The third edition of the Italian Python Conference is coming. This year we have Guido van Rossum as guest of honor! The place is Florence, the dates are 8-9-10 of May, the website is http://www.pycon.it, what are you waiting for? You cannot miss it!

Recently you may have noticed noise about Joel Spolsky vs Bob Martin and Kent Beck. I came to a conclusion that may surprise those of you that know of my background in the Agile/TDD community.

This issue came up during the organization of the upcoming Pycon conference, regarding speakers posting their slides and notes. I liked what I wrote to the organizing group so I wanted to share it here.

This episode is a direct continuation of latest issue: it gives example of use of the destructuring bind form let+ introduced there. I also discuss multiple values, unary functions and functions with optional arguments.

At the free Alternative Languages Day 0 of the upcoming Java Posse Roundup, one house has decided to have a coding dojo on the Fan programming language, which I hadn't heard of before.

In my Adventures I have referred many times to pattern matching, but only in the context of compile time pattern matching in macros. There is another form of pattern matching, which is quite common in Scheme and in other functional languages: run time pattern matching. This episode will shed some light on the technique.

Some of the skills taught to first graders appear to foreshadow modern development practices. You decide.

A talk about Scala, and an interview

Everything you ever wanted to know about currying, partial application, higher order functions and related topics.

The first installment of my long-awaited third cycle of a Pythonista's adventures with Scheme is devoted to Scheme's functional aspects.

In a SOA world, "dynamic scalability" is an architectural concern that dictates the terms of the design to which it is ascribed.

No Starch Press sent a copy of this book to me for review. My brother and his wife have been home schooling my 15-year old niece, and he wants to teach her databases.

One of the great things about hosting Open Spaces/Unconferences is the way that it inspires other people to do it, turning the idea into a viral meme. Grzegorz Duda sent me this message which I thought was worth sharing.

Since my (personally) revolutionary experiences with (1) dynamic languages and (2) open spaces conferences, I have been trying to understand how these revolutions happen. This presentation from the TED conference has given me some insights.