Jon Udell decides to steer a big ship...
Bottom line: This isn't your father's -- or maybe your older brother's or sister's -- Microsoft.Good luck Jon. Please don't join the list of the disappeared.
Where is Ozzie? Box? Cunningham was out of sight during his tenure.
How many good people does it take to create this new Microsoft? The world may never find out.
(via Steve Dekorte)
People are starting to use the Wii's remote controller for Windows and MacOSX.
James Robertson relays a presentation by Niall Ross...
The demo Niall is showing is pretty cool - using rewrite rules and a port of Store for Glorp to VW 3, he's replicating code from VW 3 into a Store repository, and then reconciling it in VW 7.x. Another cool thing - Niall and a few other people have extended the rewrite engine piece of the RB with menus, in order to make it easier to use.Another reason why Smalltalk especially, and dynamic languages generally, win. Not likely in Java, eh? No wonder they want duck typing.
On the use of XSDs, Bob DuCharme writes...
If the bad news is that the majority of XML developers have picked an ugly, convoluted syntax that is difficult to maintain when they store metadata about their types, the good news is that at least they're storing metadata about their types in parsable XML.That's not necessarily good news if the unwanted side effects of using XSDs gunk up your systems. The one cannot necessarily make up for the other. It is not just about "ugly syntax", nor is it even about ugly syntax at all.
The problems lie in the lack of expressiveness (semantics more than syntax) and the unnecessary dependencies XSDs can ripple through one's systems if one is not exceedingly careful. Such care is not often promoted by tools based on XSDs, yet in this realm people tend to rely on tools much more than wisdom.
Some people apparently want to kill Java. Hey, I am not entirely against that idea, but it should be deliberate.
In this case, some people want to continue adding to Java until it becomes nothing by trying to be everything. Java is essentially what it will be. Yeah, generics, closures, etc. are arguably helping or hurting depending on the situation... that's not what I am talking about. Read on from Paul Browne...
Now that you have Java in your open source toy bag, can I have Duck Typing please?Yeah, right. Do you understand either Java or duck typing?
P.S. I still want to keep compile time type checking to make sure I don’t make any mistakes.OK. Apparently not.
Here you go: if you want Java and duck typing, use Jython or JRuby or Rhino/Javascript or...
Do not add duck typing to Java. Ever. Period. End of sentence.
