Here's the shocking result.

http://www.bbspot.com/News/2006/08/language_quiz.php

And I thought I was just arrogant. Now I see that it's worse than I thought.

There are a number of necessary skills for being an architect. Here's a list of four that occurred to me as I tried to piece together a coherent thought from a flurry of emails.

• Summarize.
• State A Goal.
• Know The Technology.
• Manage Your Investment In Learning.

These aren't sufficient skills …

First, I'm really pleased to see a focus on end-user applications of Python. It seems like most of the Open Source Community likes to build infrastructure, operating systems, servers, frameworks and components. Maybe I'm looking in all the wrong places, but I have a soft spot in my heart for …

The points are serious issues. However, the best summary comes from Karl Guertin: "My explanation is that Duck Typing is like Ethernet, in theory it will break, but in practice it works pretty well."

There were three questions which raised four issues. The questions included the seemingly incomplete OO implementation …

In one case, the prospect had 7 interlocked databases, and wanted to do a technology upgrade. In other cases, the numbers was larger (up to 30, I think) but the problem was the same.

Essentially they said "It's taking us forever to rework this design. What should we do that …

Once I learned C++, all my C programming became poor-man's OO.

• Every "class" became a C structure type.
• Every class structure was implemented as a header file that defined the structure and a bunch of method functions.
• Each method function would have a "self" argument, which was a pointer to …

In a recent code review, I saw a bizarre habit. The author defended it so vehemently, I gave up on trying to explain the needless confusion it caused. The author was one of those "I always do it this way, and I'm always right." people, so nothing was gained by …

It appears that I may have been doing the right thing in putting together Building Skills in Object-Oriented Design . Expertise is grown through "effortful study" of the material. Experts search through their long-term memory for applicable patterns, based on their study.

The idea of many exercises, each exposing a piece …

Control Break Reporting is a design pattern that has been around since the earliest …

I like Python for exploring unknown data [One More Cool Thing About Python ].

Anthony B. Coates [Homepage ] notes "I tried Python for a while for similar reasons. However, in my case I was a bit put off by the need to learn a another library API, which is not an …