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I'm with you 1000% percent here. The only language I ever encountered that could possibly have supplanted C was FORTH, and it was doomed by legions of Unix-trained C programmers once the hardware got good enough to support C.

Nice ... any chance of a 16 GB RAM model?

My most contoversial programming opinion ... there are too fucking many programming languages already. Proposing a new one should be grounds for immediate dismissal.

Anton Ertl and David Gregg cracked this nut a long time ago with gForth / vmgen! It's only when you add registers to their basic two-stack model, like Parrot does, that you gain any more speed.

Oh, man ... you're probably going to be sorry you asked, but here it is - my first coding book:

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/univOfIllinoisUrbana/illiac/ILL...

Not any more. The time to be a "Rails beginner" was in 2005 / 2006. I'd jump on Node.js if you want to be in on the ground floor.

Now why would I want to be in a Google Hangout and take time away from hacking? ;-)

Seriously, maybe next week.

Yes, the Manhattan Project number crunching was mostly done by humans on mechanical calculators. There were some electromechanical machines available to them.

After the war, though, some of the calculations for the "super" - the Hydrogen Bomb - were done on electronic machines. In particular, there was a concern that the Super might ignite the atmosphere and the calculations to check that were a bit much for rooms full of people coordinated by pneumatic tubes.

Yes - I agree - it's something of a tradition with me to just list my Top Five projects. But it seems to me like the blogosphere / Twittersphere is a better place for that discussion than my small blog and Twitter following, especially since I spend time on things other than open source software.

In fact, I'd think this board is a much better place for discussion than my blog. So ... what do you think are the biggest issues in the open source world? I'd say they're

1. The Oracle lawsuit against Google, 2. The sale of Novell to Attachmate, and 3. The forking of OpenOffice.org.

Just off the top of my head, I'd say it's pretty much useless without a betting strategy. I'd recommend starting with "Dr. Z's Beat the Racetrack". It's out of print, but you should be able to find a copy.

Ayup - it's the RPocalypse ;-)

Good probability book? What's wrong with Feller? ;-)

Linear algebra: well, there are lots of good theory books but I'm a big fan of the computational approach, and Golub and Van Loan is my pick there hands down!

yeah ... that was my point ... it's a tradition to write Lisp in Lisp / Scheme in Scheme but it's also a testimony to the simplicity of Lisp 1.0. The actual first functioning Lisp interpreter was written in IBM 704 assembler, but once that was done, everything else from that day forward could have been done in Lisp. A fair amount of it was, once macros and Lisp compilers showed up.

Oh, for crying out loud! Have you no sense of history? The whole point of Lisp and Scheme is that you can write the interpreter in Lisp or Scheme! It's a sad day when you have to write a Lisp interpreter in Python, which is itself an interpreter written in C.

God has killed so many kittens because of you. ;-)

Yeah - Yahoo! could certainly use some Welchian / Michael Porter strategic sense. The problem is that Google needs to do that too. That's why I think they should sell Flickr to Google - it's a much better fit for Google than Yahoo!

Delicious is a dog - I don't use it any more. To be fair, I don't use Digg, Reddit or StumbleUpon either. I get my traffic from Twitter, DZone, Reddit Programming and here.

Upcoming is an interesting situation. We use it here in PDX for some things, but we have our own local event calendar, Calagator.org. There's also Meetup.com and Eventbrite and Facebook calendars. I'm not sure anyone really owns that space, but at least Meetup has a revenue model.

I would open source Pipes and YQL. I would shut down Delicious, sell Flickr to Google and try to find a buyer for Upcoming. Really, I think the best thing that's left in Yahoo! is Finance - I'd build that up.

I'm a junior blogger. ;-) But I already asked him what his business does. ;-)

I guess it depends on what your overall business plan is. There's nothing wrong with growing slowly if you have a niche you can defend and can keep your expenditures (of both money and time) low enough to achieve profitability.

What does your business do? Is there a link somewhere I can read?

I could buy that argument if people in the Valley weren't so harsh to founders from other parts of the world and so adamant that the people there were "better" in some significant way than, say, my home town of PDX. I've heard a number of stories of businesses that were told to move their HQ to Silicon Valley. That's a big part of why I wrote what I wrote - Angelgate was just the crowning example of arrogance and viciousness that seems to inhabit Silicon Valley.

Funny you should mention Boston. Paul Graham used to say there were three places to start a company - Cambridge / MIT / Harvard, Berkeley / UC Berkeley, and Palo Alto / Stanford. And he commuted between Boston and Silicon Valley.

Then he decided Boston was not a good place to raise a child and moved full-time to Silicon Valley. It's written up somewhere on his blog - I don't have the link handy. I don't know much about Boston these days, but in the early 1980s when I used to call on DSP folk with Floating Point Systems, it seemed vibrant. And the food was a lot better than anything I've ever had in Silicon Valley. ;-)

Well - maybe it was, but it was created by Kakigarden, not Techcrunch.

Paul, Jason: I think Silicon Valley has a huge problem, and this whole Facebook / YCombinator thing is a symptom. Silicon Valley's problem is that it values only dollars and code. Silicon Valley has become a world where the hacker culture, lifestyle, behavior and attitudes are the norm - a world where gladiatorial combat in code has replaced the discipline of software engineering.

I'd pick #2 in a heartbeat! Customers! Products!