I just came across Steve Yegge's "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns," which (might) provide much of the explanation for why Java programs always seem to end up being excessively verbose.

Wired Magazine, April 2008, page 44. Expired: ASP.NET, Tired: PHP, Wired: Django.

One of my main objectives at Pycon 2008 was to hear about experiences regarding existing tools for parallelizing Python programs, and also to find out more about mathematical programming with Python.

I've posted the slides from my PyCon 2008 keynote on python.org. Here are the URLs, plus a warning against the temptation of changing your APIs at the same time as porting to Py3k. This is really important!

I propose the term "superlanguages" to describe languages with extensible syntax, designed for the implementation of domain specific embedded languages and to support language oriented programming, because they effectively provide a superset of the syntax and semantics of other languages.

This is a free sample of a book that I have been working on with my coauthor Jamie King. As of March 2008, the full book is not yet available. However, this sample covers C# 3.0 fundamentals, and provides a full grounding in C# 3.0 Query Expressions.

I’ve been doing this job for decades and I can’t remember a time when people weren’t carrying on about data types. To my way of thinking, this hysteria has often resulted in overdesigned solutions that are so safe it isn’t actually practical to use them. Sort of like wearing a seat belt while sitting at the kitchen table.

The main job of a phone, after all, is to behave in a phone-like manner: always connected, always on and always available. If application failure could preempt these canonical device behaviors, we’d have, um..Windows. But we don’t. Thus, an incorruptible safety net is required, and we get this from the Symbian Leave architecture.

Ruby is the cool new kid of on the block and has some significant cred in code-generation circles. Python has whitespace sensitivities that make it a poorer fit for templating solutions. This sounds like a no-brainer decision but is the real argument about which language the market wants to see used?

I read somewhere that over half of acquisitions fail. I think the percentage might be much higher than half.

If you have C++ background and some experience with Model-View-Controller architecture, the structure of a basic Symbian GUI app will be surprisingly familiar.

An interview I did recently with Mike Riley of Dr. Dobb's Journal has been released: http://www.ddj.com/architect/205918857 (click through for a live hyperlink).

How do you balance the needs of all the parties involved in a conference, or in any event where people are traveling to be in one place?

This is the best way to get a head start on the new language features, especially LINQ.

Tonight I released a new version of ScalaTest, which contains a few changes to the way in which you express assertions and a Suite discovery feature. This release contains all the features that I plan to have in version 1.0, so it is ready for a few months of beta testing.