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In reading through Steve Yegge’s old blog, I found a statement that perfectly summarises what selecting a programming language for a complex project is like:

So… the best way to compare programming languages is by analogy to cars. Lisp is a whole family of languages, and can be broken down approximately as follows:

  • Scheme is an exotic sports car. Fast. Manual transmission. No radio.
  • Emacs Lisp is a 1984 Subaru GL 4WD: “the car that’s always in front of you.”
  • Common Lisp is Howl’s Moving Castle.

This succinct yet completely accurate synopsis shows that all Lisps have their attractions, and yet each also has a niche. You can choose a Lisp for the busy person, a Lisp for someone without much time, or a Lisp for the dedicated hobbyist, and you’ll find that no matter which one you choose, it’s missing the library you need.

Except replace the lisp dialects with every language ever written, and factor in portability issues, and you now know what it’s like to be a multi-lingual programmer xD.

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Now this is what a *real* web surfers experience looks like: What Firefoxs memory leak feature taught me about life

It also reminds me of an old photo of mine:

Having used Firefox since the 1.0.x days, I’ve also come to find it one of the single most annoying web browsers ever written. Then again, I am also a weirdo who thinks both Internet Explorer and Mozilla should rot in hell… for crimes against the Internet.

If Vista is a dog, I’m a hairy monkey

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I just got finished reading an article involving Steve Ballmer and Vista, and I can’t help but find it patronizing lol.Windows Vista was a huge success: for Windows 7!

Microsoft did with Vista, something they *should* have done by XP Service pack 2, if not with XP itself. For eons developers have been doing *nasty* things with Windows, and either through compatibility requirements with 9x, or sheare developer incompetence, there has also been a lot of software that, should we say, is little evolved beyond Win32s or the MS-DOS style. Some of the commercial apps I’ve seen over the years, I am actually shocked will run under XP, let along Vista and 7—despite everyone’s gripes, it’s one of the things MS gets right.

Most of the more verbose complaints that I’ve heard about Vista, are not the OSes fault. More often it falls upon the realm of stupid application developers, flaky software, or stupid users. Microsoft has also been about as smart on handling the conversion of users, from a DOS model to a proper NT model, to a more modern NT model (read modern as in post 1960s), as the government is about spending  <_<. Most of the software issues have ironed out by brute force, there is just no choice, because Windows NT 6.1 (7) is not that far from NT 6.0 (Vista).

Considering that it had to happen eventually, either by a painstaking multi-generation (of users) process of evolution and education, and that the general brain damaged failure of Vista to win users hearts,  is almost the quintessential Microsoft recipe for success: a mixture of bait and switch with the old triple-E.

Windows 7 is not Vista, and it makes sufficient adjustments to make most people happy. After enough time of having to deal with Vista, everything but the stupid users (and bogoware) have largely caught up, plus you have the appeasing impact of Win7, mated to the users already knowing how to ‘live’ with Vista.

The positive aspects of what Vista has done for 7s success, could not have been more valuable, if Microsoft had planned it before the whole blackcomb/longhorn/vienna thing was even worked out. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was planned.

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Now this article by Paul Graham was one that I thoroughly enjoyed. Although it might not be obvious to outsiders, it’s actually rather tastey for its wit ;).

My thoughts on “Debugger Tips: 8 ways breakpoints can save your next software project”

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Debugger Tips: 8 ways breakpoints can save your next software project: “Here are eight fairly simple techniques for using breakpoints and other features of your C/C++ debugger that can give you enormous power and visibility into your program.

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An interesting article that’s worth the reading, for anyone who is ever going to get stuck running a debugger. Personally, I prefer log files and analyzing the code in my brain, but when it’s a task you can’t cram up there in grey matter, or you need to cuddle up to the run time—a good debugger is your best friend.

Thoughts of ‘home’

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Now this old article from Joel Spolsky makes me think of what it’s like to be here, *and* trying to get work done. Managing computer work flow is simple, at best, just tell everyone to go to hell or sign off the IM. After so many years of being on the Internet, I can usually juggle multiple tabs without any real loss to getting stuff done. Having to get up and respond to an interrupt, and usually being interrupted twice more on the way back to my console on the other hand, is something that occurs so frequently I’ve almost a spider sense about it…

If I had a penny for every time I’ve been shafted that way, for lack of being able to escape to a private bunker, I would have enough cash to pay off the national debt!

Experience shows me one fact: I am most productive when I’m camped in front of a laptop, all is quiet in the world, NO interrupts, no morons to wait on hand and foot, nada, not even a music stream. Oh, that and realising the clocks changed from PM to AM, and I’m still coding smoothly xD.

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In my ever successful attempt at spending sometime “Resting”, rather then just working my ass off in front of a computer, since some how there’s still nothing else to work on here >_>, I’ve been fluttering through some articles, mostly over at the Daily WTF!, as those who use the same ‘microblogging’ platform I do, would have noticed. I also came across a few interesting finds:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ThePerilsofJavaSchools.html

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/APIWar.html

Although a tad dated by now, but still interesting hehe.

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As is my custom when encountering a blog post, I’ll usually check the current entries and grep for anything of interest after perusing what I came for; in this case, it was a blog post that floated into mention on #vim, during a short discuesion of git and hg. When I hit the ‘home’, I noticed a pair of entries: 1, 2; on the iPad.

It reminds me of why I stuck up my nose at the iPad about 5 seconds into the news report: because if it’s not *at least* as easy to screw with as OS X, it’s just one more over priced pile of garbage as far as I’m concerned… Then again, I’m kind of an odd ball, that I expect mobiles and tablets to be at least as good fun as early microcomputers were 15 years ago ^_^. I wonder how many decades I’ll have to wait for that in the American market place :-/. It’s actually possible to get outdated PDAs that are more fun, but unfortunately require some what of an import cost and learning some Japanese lol.

Interesting tidbit: Twitter Talking Separately to Microsoft and Google About Big Data-Mining Deals

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Shared from Google Reader

Twitter Talking Separately to Microsoft and Google About Big Data-Mining Deals—BoomTown

If this is how they plan to make a crappy search engine (Microsoft’s) better, by trusting in Twit’wits, oh boy and I glad that Mage introduced me to Google all those years ago lol.

I’ve used several search engines over the years, in the end I have no respect for Microsoft’s offering (Hotmail has improved, search has not) and some respect for the one over at Ask.com; which I was introduced to when some program (thankfully) changed my default search provider in IE. Since I’ve never used Yahoo! For searching, I generally skip commenting on them. Microsoft how ever, I used there search engine for many many years, dating all the way back to WebTV—at least Google tries to find what I’m looking for ;).