alec

The big feature Emacs provides that Vim doesn't in this case is integration with the window manager. Emacs lets me create another X window that shares the same set of buffers, clipboards, and other state with another. This is advantageous because it works like everything else and is especially useful with a tiling window manager.

How is this better than a mapping between uid and LinkedIn?

" nor has it been desired enough to motivate other phone manufacturers to put Flash on their phones"

... except for all the ones using Android. RIM's supposedly also working on Flash for the Blackberry.

"Adobe needs to make a killer product, not try to pressure Apple using the popular opinion."

They seem to think they _have_ the killer product, and it's hard to argue with them - Flash is ubiquitous and has been for years, provides the content on a number of important sites (video on YouTube, charts on Google Finance and Analytics, all those stupid games and greeting cards, ...). It may not last long with HTML5, but it's going to be years before that's widespread - hell, there are still people campaigning to get rid of IE6 and 7.

"Do we really need to destroy other peoples' way of doing things to feel good about our way of doing things?"

No, but it's a valid concern that if you don't, you'll be stuck programming in it when it becomes popular (Java, Python, PHP, ...).

"No; The line has to be executed for the error to show up in a dynamic language."

That may be true for some dynamic languages with primitive tools and implementations, but is not inherent in dynamic languages. For example, SBCL will alert me to branches that are impossible to take, adding strings and numbers, and even more if I've specified types (which is optional). As an added bonus, if I'm using SLIME in emacs, the s-expressions in question will be highlighted with a note. Factor and Scheme will perform similar tricks, and there's even Typed Scheme, which lets you convert your dynamically-typed code to statically-typed code incrementally.

Seems reasonable to assume it's the big player in video patents, MPEG LA. Apple has contributed patents to their pool.

"A patent pool is being assembled to go after Theora and other “open source” codecs now."

That's kind of scary.

"The web is the closest we've ever come to a standards compliant universal platform that is write once - works everywhere, period."

I think Java applications succeeded better in this regard. I remember hearing about fewer incompatibilities between JRE versions than I currently hear between browsers; there was never a "stop supporting JRE 1" campaign like there has been for successive versions of IE.

"Crucially, two of those were patents that IBM explicitly promised never to raise against open source."

What sort of weight does that promise carry? It's hard not to draw parallels to the .NET patent discussion. Maybe these sorts of promises don't mean anything because they still have enough related patents to sink a free software project.

Swapping has been demonstrated to be seriously detrimental to the life expectancy of solid state drives.

That function is valid Lua.

"It amazes me how some programming language authors seem to be clueless about really major areas of our field."

I saw Larry Wall speak within the last year or so about Perl 6. His presentation on the stuff inherited from Perl 5 was solid, but when he started talking about the other things that were more functional and/or "like Haskell", there was a marked change in his confidence and depth of description. I saw him go to dinner with some people organizing the talk and when asked about what other languages he had studied besides Perl, I recall his answer was something along the lines of "well, lots of Perl is written in C." I came away with the impression that he didn't study other languages in order to improve Perl, and the more functional stuff in Perl 6 was coming from somewhere else.

I like the layout better than Google's. It's nice that it's centered on the page and that the zero-click info stands out.

"So why not create syntax that catches 99% of the cases for which you intend the language to be used and abolish the ability to create further syntax?"

Because then I've got a syntax that works for 99% of the use cases you've already thought of, and that doesn't overlap very well with the use cases I have or that either of us will come up with in the future.

Where's the one where the Python programmer has to make something go fast and needs to write a C module?

Not always:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/benchmark.php?test=all...

They have two mallocs?

Stores passwords in plain text on disk: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=25404&...

I noticed that detail when I was trying out Chromium a while back, and it still hasn't been fixed. It seems like a simple but basic security feature. I don't know what else isn't done yet, but it does make me worry. No guarantees that Firefox isn't doing similar things I'd object to, but I don't know about them, so for better or worse I have more confidence in it.

This article puts most of the blame on Summers for his expansion plans; I've seen other articles put the blame on Meyer and El-Erian for running the endowment like a hedge fund.

I think the Google angle has been overblown. Sure, all the designers are from Google, but Google employs a number of people who are prominent in one language or another - Guido, for one, and Bram Moolenaar is working on Zimbu. It got posted to reddit by one of the Google people as "from Google", and the first talk was done at Google, so I think everyone just made an assumption. Google is nowhere on the front page of golang.org, and the developers are using @golang.org addresses.

I bet the developers are surprised at the media storm and wouldn't have otherwise gotten it except for that initial Reddit post explicitly tying it to Google.

"While this effort [SPDY] from Google aims to make everything faster, it is largely orthogonal to what we’re trying to do with Resource Package."

Seems to solve the same problem, though, but without the headache of rewriting everything.

I wonder how this applies to software development. The article says it applies to works for hire; if there's 35-year-old code out there, could the original author get rights to some part of the program back or otherwise block use of the software? I could still see this being applicable for legacy mainframe code.

Ikiwiki seems to target the same nitch as Markdoc. Do you know how they compare?

Lisp's macros are foremost a cheap anonymous lambda - with-open-file, dolist, and the like don't need to be macros, but it's much more convenient and efficient than passing a lambda to another function.

Certainly, though, transforming code is more popular than introducing laziness.

"Why do they have to defend this careers thing so much?"

A career page seems to be the preferred route to go to raise revenue for programming websites. They're not defending it, they're promoting it. Using a job board to directly or indirectly raise revenue is done here, on reddit, on Joel on Software, and now on Stack Overflow. Probably because programmers often have adblock on and don't generally buy a lot of software.

Compare their results for "a* search" with Google's. One has a video about police searches in the first page of results, and the other is Duck It.

> I hope this criticism is helpful.

It is, thank you.

I'm still looking for the sweet spot; I hope that the link titles themselves give enough context to decide if it's interesting when the topic is one you know, and the blurb just enough to decide if it's one you don't. Next week I'm going to try inverting the link and the description and see if that's more helpful.

I currently work on QPX, the air travel search engine. We continue to use SBCL, primarily because it produces faster code for our workload. We and our customers are very sensitive to the performance of the application.

Dan Weinreb, another ITA developer, did a talk at Google a few months ago on ITA's new reservation system (the Polaris project you mention). They do use CCL, but the code also compiles and runs with SBCL. The primary reason he cites in that talk for preferring CCL over SBCL (about 22 minutes in) is that CCL compiles code more quickly than SBCL.

I haven't used CCL much, but I understand SBCL and CCL have different debugging strengths. An SBCL developer tells me that a significant chunk of the compilation time for our application is in constraint propagation for types. That's part of the "generates more efficient code", but it also means that it's smart about telling you when you're doing something that's not going to work. For whatever reason, type propagation or otherwise, CCL won't do as much to help you at compile time. I am told that CCL gives better stack traces, so SLIME can help you more.

Does the zoom problem hamper your ability to read small graphs? I would be concerned about graphs that fit into one of two columns on the page.