Feb 18

Interview Day: Haskell

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Interview: Haskell

Explain Monads… in five words or less

What about the other languages?

Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?

Feb 17

Moving forward to get to the same place

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Back of Sam

Do you ever feel like you have been going forward only to suddenly see the back of your own head from the past?

That has been happening to me recently. There are a slew of very cool technologies that I am keen to be playing with at the moment. I have a new little app that I am building, and do I take this chance to play more with:

  • ErlyWeb and Erlang
  • Django and Python
  • Jaxer and JavaScript
  • Lift and Scala
  • Grails and Groovy
  • Merb and Ruby

Or do I stick to my old favourites?

There are definite advantages to trying out the new thing. By learning something new, I always take something back with me to the old. I can also better understand a slightly different world, which is important to me, and my role.

On the other hand, what if I hadn’t always kept up to date. What if I had stayed with the framework that I built in CGI land in Perl. I knew that puppy inside and out. I was constantly adding needed features a la Basecamp » Rails). Sure, there were no books, and I couldn’t hire others that knew the framework already, but man I was fast with it… and if I kept at it for the last 10 years who knows what it would be? Maybe by now I would have build a mind reader DSL?

Would that have actually have been a worse approach? On each new project I wouldn’t have to learn a thing. But, maybe the code would have kept growing and become a legacy ball of mess.

When you jump to something new you get to do spring cleaning. You don’t bring all of the baggage with you, and you hopefully learn the few things that you want to bring along.

This fits in with IDEs too. As you see people jump around to the latest and greatest, would they be better off if they just stuck with emacs and customized the hell out of it? I took huge pride in my .emacs and corresponding .el files. Emacs was at one with me :)

As I jump on a flight to London, I think I will go for something new though, as it will keep me from boredom enough to actually do something on the flight. Sometimes you need something new just to feel alive.

Feb 17

Are you kidding me? Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac, and Disney

Tech 2 Comments »

We all know that Ben can be a little anal when it comes to pixels. He has a nice post making fun of how bad Word 2008 for Mac is.

This really is painful:

Ironically, if you look through Mary Jo Foley’s slideshow on the Microsoft reorg you will find that Roz Ho has actually been promoted recently. Roz was that person who you saw at the Stevenote’s when you thought “oh no”. She would come on stage, with all the energy that Steve had been creating, and brought it down by saying “I know we said we would be done, but Word will be out soon I promise! Microsoft really does care.” Ugh.

I have another “duh” from the week. One very cool feature of the Buzz Lightyear ride at Disneyland is that when you come out you can use a touchscreen to find a photo of yourself, and email that photo. To proove my score to my young cousins I wanted to show them the facts. I opened up my iPhone and got this email:

Galactic Greetings Space Ranger,

You have received an intergalactic transmission from a friend who has just completed a mission on the new Buzz Lightyear Astro Blaster interactive experience at Disneyland(r) park in California.

Visit http://disneyland.com/buzzphotos and enter the following code number into the code box to view a photo of Star Command’s newest hero:

*********************************************
CODE NUMBER: 79E987F41E92EB07C1AF20AC858234566
*********************************************

To Infinity and Beyond!

http://www.disneyland.com/Buzz

What is wrong with this picture? Instead of either:

  • Just sending the photo as an attachment
  • Or, giving me a link that I can click on to get it

I instead see that use code, that isn’t hyperlinked. Since the iPhone doesn’t have copy and paste I would have to resort to testing my memory or finding a pen to note the bugger down. Why make the user go through this?

This brings me to my last rant of the day:

I hate the Disney vault

My two year old is interested in the Lion King. I then want to purchase the movie, but nooooo the film is in the Disney vault. Are you kidding me? Do you really make more money by making these movies seem “rare” when they come back out to DVD? Please don’t be dicks and let people download the 1’s and 0’s. This makes me want to suck the bugger down with bittorrent. I hate false supply and demand markets. Disney, with the vault you are like the diamond and gold runners!

Feb 17

Interview Day: JavaScript

Comic, JavaScript, Tech with tags: 1 Comment »

Interview: JavaScript

Write a system that allows for Class based OO… and then explain why it is a stupid idea

What about the other languages?

Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?

Feb 16

Microsoft Declares… Part Three

Comic, JavaScript, Microsoft, Tech 1 Comment »

Microsoft Declares… Part Three

At first we had Nelly and XSL/T, and then we had Lisp. Now it is time to to evolve to C^HJavaScript.

ps. There is nothing geekier than a ^H joke.

Feb 16

Interview Day: Arc

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Interview: Arc

Build a Web input DSL… using a JavaScript implementation

What about the other languages?

Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?

Feb 15

The cloud can get foggy, but your house can blow up

Tech with tags: , , 1 Comment »

Oh my god. S3 had some downtime!

The world is in chaos. Don’t they know that we depend on them? Don’t they know this is utility computing?

Well, so is the water system, but even that breaks at my place from time to time. Or some chink in the armour appears. Just this morning someone had to come over to replace the water heater which was leaking. Although the utility was working fine, it didn’t matter much if I couldn’t heat it up!

As Charlie Wood says downtime happens, and of course you should plan for it.

I see this kind of out break a lot on other “outsourced” applications. Take Gmail for example. If Gmail is down for a second it appears on TechCrunch. However, how often has your works Exchange system “gone down”?

We need to compare these services to live before hand. How often did your ISP go down, or your managed host? Do you remember what it was like when you had that crappy virtual slice at PoorServiceForAll.com?

It is time to chill a little on the cloud.

Electric Cloud

Feb 15

Microsoft Declares… Part Two

Comic, Microsoft, Tech 1 Comment »

Microsoft Declares Part Two

At first we had Nelly and XSL/T, and then we end up with Lisp.

Feb 15

Interview Day: Lisp

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Interview: Lisp

Build a self-changing program that beats me at chess… without CLOS

What about the other languages?

Got some good ones for other languages like Fortran, BASIC or assembly?

Feb 14

Microsoft Declares

Comic, Microsoft, Tech with tags: , 2 Comments »

Microsoft Declares

Paul Krill asked Bill Gates about declarative languages and how they are the future (and ironically the past!). Bill talked about some of the work happening at Microsoft:

“Most code that’s written today is procedural code. And there’s been this holy grail of development forever, which is that you shouldn’t have to write so much [procedural] code,” Gates said. “We’re investing very heavily to say that customization of applications, the dream, the quest, we call it, should take a tenth as much code as it takes today.”

“You should be able to do things on a declarative basis,” Gates continued. But this has not caught on partially because of weak data models — first Codasyl and then relational. Stronger data models since have emerged, such as rich schemas around XML as well as modeling work being done by Microsoft and others, Gates said. “We’re bringing the data models up to be much, much richer, and we think in that environment, a lot of business logic can be done in a declarative form. Now, we haven’t totally proven this yet. We’re doing a lot of internal developments ourselves that way,” including some Microsoft business applications, he said.

“We’re not here yet saying that [a declarative language has] happened and you should write a ton less procedural code, but that’s the direction the industry is going,” Gates said. “And, despite the fact that it’s taken longer than people expected, we really believe in it. It’s something that will change software development but more like in a five- to eight-year timeframe than overnight,” he said.

I am guessing that the work of Doug Purdy, ChrisAn, and Don Box is fitting into this world, as well the mentioned work of Brad Lovering.

But…. maybe the future is a port of Jelly ;)