It's not uncommon to run across technical papers published in postscript. It's not clear to me why people still do this, but until yesterday I've never had the patience to figure out how to read them.

Every once in a while I come up with a good idea for Heron, and then inevitably Vesa Karvonen tells me that it existed in ML since the dawn of time. Maybe this time will be different?

The trend towards microparsing in XML specifications, is killing the spirt of XML.

Various musings about how to deal with units of measure in the Heron graphics library.

Why does software suck? Is it just because most of anything sucks or is there something particular about software that enhances the suckage factor?

Or do they?

File this under 'tooting my own horn'.

This is a one-sided analysis of the downsides of using stored procedures. PLEASE do not take this to mean that I'm in any way against their *judicious* use.

In Python variables are never explicitly typed. I consider this a Very Bad Thing.

Threading has sucked down a lot of my life in the past few years. Aside from work on earlier versions of Thinking in Java, I clocked 8 months on the threading chapter in "Thinking in C++, Volume 2." I've already spent several months on the "Concurrency" Chapter in "Thinking in Java 4th edition." And now I'm back working on it again.

Currently Heron is not allowing implicit casting to function arguments. I am trying to decide whether this is a good thing.

For loop constructs in programming languages are usually syntactic sugar, but what should they map to?

When it comes down to it, C++ does only one thing wrong, it tries to be everyone's language.

A new Heron release is now available.

Don't let slow tests bog you down.