Category: projects (Page 11 of 25)

I heard this story on MPR a few weeks ago and was pretty fired up about the idea. If you have a good idea for how to use government data in a web app, let me know and maybe we can build one.

Recent article in Tech News World about which languages are most popular.

Now, I expect most popular writing on programming to gloss over the actual technical stuff and speak directly to managers, who often can’t program their way out of a paper bag. But this quote is just pure nonsense:

Perl, Ajax, Python and Ruby are variants of Java? That’s just wrong, technically and chronologically. Perl was first released in 1987. Java was first released in 1995. Ajax isn’t a language at all, it’s a pattern. It’s like saying “Poems are a language.” Python and Ruby, while object-oriented like Java, are certainly not variants. And none of them generate Java code, effectively or not.

Asinine.

PHP finally has namespaces. Always playing catch-up as a programming language. But using the backslash as a name delimiter? WTF.

I drank the koolaid a few years ago on the usefulness of test-driven development. I have Perl and the Perl community to thank for that. chromatic outlines the history of Perl’s test-infected culture in a recent post.

Roy resurrected the Swish-e project nearly 10 years ago. There’s a nice interview with him out recently, in which he says “there really isn’t anything I can’t do with Perl and my favorite indexing tool, Swish-e” — which is exactly my experience too.

Thanks, Roy.