Read this: "Here Comes Functional Programming" by Larry O'Brien in SD Times.

people who should know better continue to assert that statically typed languages are "safer, because the compiler can catch errors that otherwise wouldn't show up until runtime." While it's true a statically typed language can detect that you've …

Got this a few weeks back.

My job is to persuade bloggers to link to our site.

I really love my job! We have a friendly team and good management, but unfortunately I have no idea how to convince a blogger to link to us, I'm afraid I might lose …

See this Limitations of Agile Software Development and this The Agile "Religion" -- What?.

What's important is that the limitations of Agile are not limitations. They're (mostly) intentional roadblocks to Agile.

Looking for "limitations" in the Agile approach misses the point of Agile in several important ways.

The most important problem …

See Andrew Binstock's "Windows 8: Microsoft's Development Re-Do".

The costs of these migrations has been enormous and continues to accumulate...

I can only rub my hands with glee and engage in shameless "I Told You So" self-congratulations.

Only you can prevent being held hostage by Microsoft.

More than once, I've …

I really dislike being asked to plan a project. It's hard to predict the future accurately.

In spite of the future being -- well -- the future, and utterly unknowable, we still have to have the following kinds of discussions.

Me: "It's probably going to take a team of six."

Customer: "We …

A recent question.

i came up with two options.

1. building skills 1 (+ other references)... then algorithms & data structures.... then your books 2 & 3

or

2. your three books 1,2 & 3... then algo & ds kindly help me decide so i can start soon.

I have two pieces of advice …

Emphasis on the "More On" as in "Moron". This is a standard design error story. The issue is that inheritance happens along an "axis" or "dimension" where the subclasses are at different points along that axis. Multi-dimensional inheritance is an EPIC FAIL.

The topic of VMware came up at my local 757 Python Users Group.

A common administrative need is to control VM farms. While there are a number of pointy-clicky GUI tools, VMware offers the VIX library to permit writing scripts to control VM's.

Here's some information we looked at recently …

Received

"it seems that software development has caught the agile religion. Personally, I have an issue w/ being unimodal."

What?

First. "agile religion". As in the deprecating statement: Agile is nothing more than a religion? As in Agile is nothing more than a vague religious practice with no tangible value …

In Command-Line Applications, we looked at a Python main-import switch which boiled down to this.

for file in args.file:
    with open( file, "r" ) as source:
        process_file( source, args )

The point was that each distinct file on the command-line was processed in a more-or-less uniform way by a single function …