Daily Archives: May 21, 2009

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages

Posted on May 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

Alex Cruise (who is obsessed with Scala) sent me this awesome history of programming post by James Iry.

I think my favorite entry is this one:

1972 – Dennis Ritchie invents a powerful gun that shoots both forward and backward simultaneously. Not satisfied with the number of deaths and permanent maimings from that invention he invents C and Unix.

I really found the time line interesting. I honestly wouldn’t have guessed Ruby was that old. Everyone thinks of the 70s as such a fertile time in language development (everyone who was anyone came up with a language), but we easily forget the important milestones in the 50s. Half a century later we are still dealing with some of the decisions made in this time.

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Recent eBizQ Posts

Posted on May 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

Lately I’ve been participating in Peter Schooff’s excellent SOA forum on eBizQ. Here are a collection of my recent responses to questions on the forum, in no particular order:

My general profile is here, which will include new commentary.

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eBizQ Forum Question: What Do You Believe is the Biggest Inhibitor Today to SOA Adoption?

Posted on May 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

My thoughts are here.

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The Web 2.0 Uniform

Posted on May 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

Web 2.0 is (in priority order):

  • A conference
  • A handful of technology
  • All that social stuff
  • A look

One thing I noticed by suddenly engaging with all of those things like Twitter that I actively avoided in the past is that they are all surprisingly usable (WordPress included–this is good stuff). In the last year I’ve really begun to re-evaluate JavaScript and what you can realistically do with it. And I have to admit that the mix of JavaScript and some Flash is a pretty powerful combination (I’ve been playing with Flash charting packages a lot).

Here’s a great summary of some of the leading Web 2.0 looks and UI elements. jQuery continually amazes me.

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Lego Architecture Series

Posted on May 21, 2009 | Leave a comment

When I first started my career at the TRIUMF physics lab I worked with an engineer who did an informal poll of everyone he ever worked with, asking if they played with lego as a child. 100% of his co-workers did.

Lego has been good at going after the adult geek market with kits like X-wing fighters, but despite my obsession with Star Wars when it came out, these never did anything for me. In general the focused kits have never appealed; I’m more of a bucket of bricks guy.

This may change with Lego’s new architecture series. They’re doing Frank Lloyd Wright first. It’s nice to see them branching out. I could see one of these cluttering up my desk…

I wonder if they’ll come up with curved titanium bricks for a Frank Gehry set?

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