Languages as people representing themselves at a conference, arguing about which one is better.

The initial productivity gain of working with a dynamic language can decline as a project's codebase grows, and as refactoring becomes increasingly a chore.

I got a consulting query over the internet the other day; they were desperate for someone to do a particular project and it seemed like I might be able to help.

This is a single HTML page so that you can use your web browser's "find" function to quickly search through the book.

How much thought did you put into the tradeoffs of the last technique you brought into your organization: Ajax, TDD, On-Site Customer, or other buzzwords? Did you research its track record? Or did you go to the buzzword yellow pages? Checklists and ceremonies border on religion, and developers seem to hold to them with religious fervor.

For all intents and purposes, Microsoft has infinite financial resources. But they create almost no new applications, and they had to seriously cut back on the features of Vista to get it out.

The basic tenet in podcasting is "Think About the Experience of your Audience." All these points are simply details of that one statement.

For over a year I've been coauthoring a book with someone who lives in another state, and we've tried various tools to pair-review and edit the document.

After much talking, experimenting, and blogging, we implemented a prototype version of crap4j - a code Change Risk Analyzer and Predictor (i.e. CRAP) for Java. A tool to help you defend yourself against overly complex and untested code. Read all about it and find out how to download and install the crap4j Eclipse plug-in.

I stumbled upon a particularly lucid explanation of Python's significant indentation, by Oliver Fromme of secnetics GmbH.

For his keynote at the 2007 Python Conference, Ivan Krstić, director of security and information architecture at the One Laptop per Child project, showed us how much of the project was written in Python. The most common question was "how do I get one?"

There's a demo including the PDF with all the introductory material and instructions including the *Everything is an Object* and *Operators* chapters and source code.

RSS seems clever close-up, if you ignore the internet traffic increase issues. But if you look at the real problem, RSS is a workaround that just supports the existing problem: anonymity.

I put several pieces of information together and experimented to fill in the missing bits. When I was done, I had a program that implemented Java interfaces and accessed external classes, as well as core classes.

Continuing the discussion of the GIL and parallel programming in Python.