Programming

Overheard: Microsoft gets a “D” in SOA

Just what the world needs…yet another programming language. As soon as you say it’s aimed at non-developers, “real” developers will avoid it like the plague. And without “real” developer support, it’s dead in the water. Fred Fredrickson, responding to Mary Jo Foley’s blog post Microsoft declares its modeling love with a new language, ‘D’

Overheard: Keystroke dynamics in two-factor authentication

Nathan Harrington amended the GNOME Desktop Manager to include keystroke dynamics in the user verification process. When the user enters their username, the timings between key press events are measured and compared against a stored pattern. Jason Striegel, Add keystroke user verification to Gnome

I think Nathan Harrington has one of the coolest jobs of anyone I know. He’s always putting something new out for people to tinker with.

Overheard: File “Mars Programming Language” under “D”

“Great, just what I need. Another D in programming.” Segfault comment

How did Mars get shortened to “D” instead of “M”?

According to the Digital Mars FAQ page:  “The original name was the Mars Programming Language. But my friends kept calling it D, and I found myself starting to call it D. The idea of D being a successor to C goes back at least as far as 1988.”

Overheard: Visual Studio Express — Hello World

The reason we’re able to offer Express for free and even let developers build commercial applications with Express is because we limit 3rd party extensibility of Express, specifically by removing support macros, add-ins, and VSIP packages. Dan Fernandez, Visual Studio Express and TestDriven.NET

Microsoft wasn’t happy when developers began to extend what was freely given to them. Dan’s post above could have been called “We give you an inch and you take a mile.”

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On another totally unrelated Dan Fernandez note:

Wow! He’s blonde in this interview. I’m a big Dan Fernandez fan — but I had a hard time watching this video because I kept thinking “why did you bleach your hair?”

In spite of my hair distraction, I liked the interview. Dan is a great evangelist for Visual Studio Express. He’s able to capture and convey that feeling of accomplishment we all felt when we made those magical words “Hello World” appeared on the monitor. He’s not a snob. He appreciates the hobbyist, the hacker and the curious.

Ok…I can’t resist.

Q: What do you call a swimming pool full of blonde Visual Studio Express evangelists?
A: Frosted Flakes.

Overheard: I don’t want to ever have to wait for Java to load

Java doesn’t do anything by itself. It’s a programming language. Programming languages are like sewage plants: if the average user becomes aware of them, something’s gone wrong. Rupert Goodwins, Gallery: 10 most annoying programs on the Internet

Love it!  When I see that Orange Java box come up, I go get a cup of coffee.

Overheard: Microsoft Cosmos

Unlike most OSes,   Cosmos doesn’t run on the bare metal of machines. Rather, it’s a virtualized OS that runs within the .NET container, intended to support .NET-based languages (particularly C#) that are also resident on the .NET container. Joe McKendrick,  A New OS is Born

Channel 8 has step-by-step directions for downloading and making Cosmos work on your PC. 

Overheard: The multiple implementations of Python

First a little background to help explain some of the terms, etc. “Python” is a language, similar to how “Java” is a language; unlike Java wherein the language is also relatively synonymous with the actual implementation of that language, Python has multiple implementations. If you’ve run python(1) from the command line, you’re most likely running the CPython implementation of the Python language, in effect, Python implemented in C. Other implementations of Python exist, like Jython (implemented on top of the Java virtual machine), PyPy (Python implemented in Python), and IronPython (Python implemented on top of the .NET CLR). R. Tyler Ballance, Comparing IronPython and CPython

Overheard: LINQ is like object-oriented programming

LINQ is an object-oriented revolution for data, because it, like object-oriented programming, allows programmers to write code that is more like the way people think. Patrick Hynds, as quoted in Does .NET With LINQ Beat Java?

Agile Development Glossary

Alex Howard created a handy glossary for business owners who want to learn how to speak Agile to their PMO.

Overheard: Bad programmers kill startups

But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers. Paul Graham, The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups