The Python Style Guide (PEP 8) lists a number of guidelines for the use of whitespace. Since there are still a lot of folks ignoring these rules, here's a proposal for enforcing them.

I used to believe that multimethods were so advanced I would never need them. Well, maybe I still believe that, but here's a quick and dirty implementation of multimethods so you can see for yourself. Some assembly required; advanced functionality left as an exercise for the reader.

Software is more than a sum of its parts.

So here's my pitch. I've been working on a grid system using Jini and mobile agents, for about 12-18 months, and now I'm nearly ready to release it as a Jini.org project. Here's a bit of an overview to Neon's features and capabilities.

Choice leads to quality, but higher standards of quality reduce choice over time. That leads to the vanishing middle: software projects increasingly consolidate into a few large projects, on one hand, and a few small, niche projects, on the other. Smaller projects can turn to transparency of their development processes as a way to gain traction.

Hygenic macros can not access the local scope where they are expanded, while unhygenic macros (as found in C) can. I want the best of both worlds!

Ben Galbraith has a great swing related webcast at JavaLobby which has a lot of good information about swing. He covers my Packer Layout Manager, and I want to reinforce some of the things he covered.

I received an email from a compatriot lamenting the planned demise of reduce() and lambda in Python 3000. After a few exchanges I think even he agreed that they can go. Here's a summary, including my reasons for dropping lambda, map() and filter(). I expect tons of disagreement in the feedback, all from ex-Lisp-or-Scheme folks. :-)

The Java language has always had the notion of marker interfaces. A problem with these is that if a parent class has the marker, all its children inevitably do too. On the other hand, marker annotations don't necessarily have this limitation. Here's how to define a marker that can be cancelled in a subclass.

Where work and life meet, we have a lot of choices.

A lot of programmers have preconceptions about C++, and very fixed ideas about what can and should be done with it. I plan on shaking this up a bit with an upcoming column called Agile C++, as well as through my work on the Object Oriented Template Library.

I really can't care about EJB3 and J2EE. In emphasis, not that I shouldn't care about J2EE, but that practically, even spiritually, I can't care about J2EE - apathy is a terrifying thing

In honor of Jef Raskin, kudos to the Gmail team.

Security is a blind spot in application development.

I believe that using a typical web browser as an interface to certain online services is inherently flawed and a better separate technology is need.