Over on my main blog you may have seen that I’m musing about my online presence again. Increasingly fed up with Facebook I’ve now taken the plunge to remove myself entirely. (I haven’t, as of writing, deleted my account only because I need to extract some more writings before I do.) I’m also increasingly concerned …
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Java Hater
Someone on Quora asked me to answer a question on my personal history of using Java. It became a kind of autobiographical confession. I’ve never had a good relationship with Java. My first OO experience was with Smalltalk. And that spoiled me for the whole C++ / Java family of strongly typed, compiled OO languages. …
What's Like RSS?
Dave Winer asked a great question back in December. What standards are like (his ideal for) RSS? That is, basically fixed forever by convention, large userbase and multiple suppliers? My suggestions : In practice, a few Unix classics : SSH, the diff / patch formats, rsync, finger. All used on a grand scale by many …
Winer's Back!
This is really good news. Dave Winer finally comes out with a decent outliner in the browser. I’ve been looking for one for a long time. (Thought of trying to write it too, but it’s not my speciality. Now you get one from the world’s biggest Outlining evangelist.) This is also great news for Winer …
Bret Victor Showreel
Bret Victor is one of the few programmers for whom it makes sense to release a .
Elm Lang
I must confess, I’m very intrigued by Elm-Lang. For me there are four virtues : 1) FRP. All the attempts I’ve seen to graft FRP onto existing languages have looked clunky to me – ahem … Trellis? – Requiring the explicit definition of special types of fields. This is the kind of thing that I think needs …
SocialCalc and Javascript
Dan Bricklin gives an update on WikiCalc / SocialCalc (the browser-based spreadsheet he wrote). It seems to be having a new lease of life as a web-app embedded in native Android / iOS apps. Nice! Also some interesting news about javascript.
Mind Traffic Control
If you haven’t looked at Mind Traffic Control recently (and I know YOU haven’t, because I see the logs), then you may be surprised. Just saying … 🙂
Personal Question
Question : Hey Phil, do you actually do any programming these days? Answer : Yes. Quite a lot at the moment. Though it’s a bit all over the shop. I’m dipping a toe into Android programming. (And, hmmm … Java …. I thought I’d got over my Java hangups by doing a lot of Processing, …
Giles Bowkett: Rails Went Off The Rails
It’s fascinating to read Giles Bowkett on Rails, its bloat, its falling out of fashion. Fascinating mainly because it so clearly highlights that no-one is immune from this life-cycle that goes : new, simpler and easier than anything else hot-new thing that everyone loves adding more fluff to deal with more edge-cases build-up of technical debt re-writes …