Interesting comments to Splitting Meta-Hairs.

Terms like Scripting, Interpreted and Dynamic are not "marketing terms". New, Improved, All Natural, Visual, Groovy, Lucid, etc., are marketing terms. I regret giving the impression that one should "not to spend time trying to get definitions that are exacting". One absolutely must get definitions …

Recently, I've been involved in some hair-splitting over the nature of Python.

I've described it as "interpreted", "scripting" and "dynamic", all of which seem to be true, but yet each seems to lead to a standard -- and pointless -- dispute.

Recently, I had two very weird "meta" questions on the subject of OO design.

They bother me because they imply that some Brother or Sister Architect has let slip the presence of the Secret Technologies that we Architects are hiding from the Hoi Polloi developers.

These are the real questions …

Eight Things Business Hates About IT. Plus eight things IT hates about business.

I suppose.

While there are 8 things identified, they seem to boil down to 2 things to fix: Replace bureaucratic with Agile; replace Keep The Lights On Management with any other way of budgeting.

While Agility is …

From time-to-time I hear a few mentions of MapReduce; up until recently, I avoided looking into it.

This month's CACM, however, is chock-full of MapReduce goodness.

After reading some of the articles, I decided to look a little more closely at that approach to handling large datasets.

Interesting thoughts: http://nedbatchelder.com/blog/201001/d_richard_hipps_software_universe.html

I use SQLite heavily. Time to look into Fossil.

Completely revised Building Skills in Object-Oriented Design. Cleaned up many of the exercises to make them simpler and more sensible to the n00b designer.

Also, to make it easier to follow, I made use of the Sphinx "ifconfig" feature to separate the text into two parallel editions: a Python edition …

I made some fundamental changes to the text processing pipeline. I think I've corrected all of the typographical and production problems. (Plus, I fixed some content errors, too.)

I've republished the Building Skills in Python, both HTML and PDF.

Hopefully, this is considerably better and more usable.

Next step -- revising …

Completely revised the Building Skills in Python book.

It now covers Python 2.6 and is much, must easier to maintain in ReStructured Text markup, formatted with Sphinx and LaTeX (via TeXLive) than it was in XML.

XML -- while modern and clean and uniform -- isn't as convenient as LaTeX and …

I've updated Building Skills in Programming -- an introduction to programming for non-programmers.

The entire thing was redone in RST and Sphinx, leading to an easier-to-read, more colorful layout. The cross-references are generally better and more complete. I also get Sphinx's indexing and search capabilities.

Everything was touched, chapters were added …