In his weblog, Cameron Purdy suggests that when a distributed system is designed as a multi-cellular organism rather than a collection of individual cells, an application need not deal with the potential for other servers to fail, but rather with it's own potential for failure.

Python is now an approved language in Google's yearly Code Jam coding contest.

I talk about my experience at having presented at the Lang. NET 2006 symposium.

A simple tool which makes refactoring safer.

I am wondering out loud whether a contract can be completely expressed as a type (or type class) in a language with a sufficiently advanced type system.

In this blog, I describe 'sensing variables', and how you can use them to make large method refactoring easier. I also discuss the potential for tools which could achieve the same effects in a nicer way.

I'm presenting the Cat programming language at Lang. NET 2006 today. The slides are now online.

Design techniques good and bad come and go in the industry, often more quickly than educators can foresee. This 'blog looks whimsically at a possible resurgence in Multi-paradigm Design, and Part II reflects on how educators can prepare students for industry design whims.

I think I'm really starting to get this "event" thing down. I can tell because, at the end of the "Web Frameworks Jam," half the people were saying "when are we going to do this again?"

Yes and no.

Two of the cardinal sins of programming are overspecification and underspecification. Today I will discuss the one most programmers are guilty of: overspecification.

A follow-up on my previous blog on pattern matching, which summarizes the discussions this entailed.

The next version of the Cat programming language, contains namespaces and type annotations.

I've been doing a lot of web programming lately. Although I've experimented with PHP, I keep migrating back to Python.

Tempted to code defensively? Maybe it's because you're dealing with offensive code.