Apparently, "it's been pretty much established as fact that Origami is a new "ultramobile lifestyle PC" from Microsoft."

This fits a couple other data points, but we'll just have to see. One way or the other, though, whoever organized this "mystery" sure earned their pay. I suspect that 90% of the bloggers linking to the origami project knew the truth.

What this reminds me of is the yearly pre-MacWorld speculation. It's been the type of thing Microsoft has not, traditionally, been very good at.

On the other hand, if it turns out the Origami project is a COBOL compiler, a lot of people will be disappointed.

hmmm....

I like Andy Hunt, and I like Ruby, but his post at perpetuates a myth that I think is harmful. He says of Ruby, "First, more than any other language I’ve used, it stays out of your way. You don’t have to spend any effort 'satisfying the compiler'.... I can type in an absurd amount of code in Ruby and have it work the first time. Not 2-3 passes .... It just works"

What I object to is a small thing: his use of the word "you" in the first sentence ("out of your way...You don't..."). I have no problem with the second part of the quote ("I can type..."). The myth is that programmers share a psychology and therefore, the tool that "fits" my mind will "fit" your mind if only you give it a try. Now, that may prove the case for particular instances of "I" and "you," and I applaud reasoned advocacy of whatever-the-heck you love in life, but I've come to believe that there is not a shared psychology of computer programming.

Please don't reduce my point to Microsoft's insulting "Mort, Elvis, Einstein," scheme, which combines the same sweeping generality I'm condemning with a heap of condescension (do you think anyone working in Redmond classifies themselves as "Mort"?). I'm talking about programmers perfectly capable of tackling the same problems with the same productivity.

What I'm suggesting is that there is not a "best" programming language, nor perhaps are there even "better" programming languages once you get beyond a certain level of functionality. Certain programming languages are better at certain tasks, without a doubt (If you want to scrape a Web page, use a language in the Perl family. If you want to keep your CPU toasty-warm, use C++ and assembler).

Are there languages that "stay out of [my] way," and in which my code "works the first time...It just works"? Absolutely. In my career, I've felt that way about Basic, Prolog, PAL, C++, Java, and, lately, C# (although I had this anonymous delegate thing the other day I still can't parse). I used to write lengthy Prolog programs on the bus and type them in when I got to work. For a brief while, I thought that would be true for everyone, if only they gave the language a chance. In retrospect, I was fortunate to fall for a language that so few loved.

Lisp is the king of languages touted as "if only you gave it a chance." But what Lisp advocates fail to acknowledge is that Lisp was given a chance by virtually everyone exposed to computer science in the 70s and 80s. Lisp and Basic are the most abandoned languages in the field. Lisp was the second or third language I learned (after Basic, and pretty much simultaneously with Fortran) and I worked with it professionally in the late 80s and early 90s. Back then, it didn't fit my psychology. Now, though, in the Jolt Awards, my vote for best book of the year will go to Peter Seibel's "Practical Common Lisp" and I've caught myself thinking about burying a Lisp interpreter in an upcoming project.

Ruby is the belle of the ball currently, largely because of Rails. It's a recurring theme in programming language popularity that the differences between languages, which are very real, are masked by libraries and toolsets. Smalltalk, for instance, may or may not "fit" your mind, but the Smalltalk browser and workspace were, without a doubt, years beyond other IDEs. Ruby may or may not "fit" your mind, but Rails is without a doubt the most influential framework in several years. Java brought unit-testing into the mainstream, VB brought GUI builders, etc.

The shame is that when advocates conflate the benefits of their libraries and tools with the psychological aspects of their language, they focus attention incorrectly. What you get is "Hey, let's port Rails to .NET," or whatever, when what is needed is more discussion of what makes Ruby "fit" in certain approaches. Especially frustrating is that we don't even have a decent vocabulary for discussing language differences. People talk about "dynamic languages" and that, to many, means "dynamic typing," which, to many, means "implicit typing." And implicit vs. explicit typing so dominates the discussion of programming languages that IT MAKES ME WANT TO F***ING SHOOT MYSELF!!!!! THERE ARE OTHER ISSUES, PEOPLE!!!!!!

Okay, sorry.

But, for instance, Prolog relies on sequences of predicates: true, true, false ... oh, back up, try something else ... true, true, true, etc. Is that something that "fits" your mind or not? I haven't tried any languages that implement predicate dispatch, but I'm thoroughly convinced such languages would appeal to me.

Another example: As I've been reinvestigating Lisp, I've found myself actively liking Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses. Now, I'm like "Yeah, why should I type a ')' to end a call, a ';' to end a statement, and a '}' to end a block? They're not 'superfluous,' there are rarely more parentheses than there would be operators-or-punctuators." But is seeing different operators important to you to quickly understand structure? (For me, I think a major reason for my change in attitude is that after 17 years of OO, flow-control in my programs is now much more governed by the structure of the object-graph, not the values of local variables.)

[...Wow. I didn't intend to rant like this... Okay, finishing it off abruptly...]

The important thing is to realize that different languages engage your mind in different ways. There are languages that you will find allow you to be profoundly more productive solving certain problems. Search for those languages, and do not conflate tool and environmental benefits (equally interesting, equally worth pursuing) with language benefits. Also realize that your own mental approach to programming is always evolving and may change the way that a certain language strikes you.

Okay. Off to walk the dog.

Oh, you have to try My Heritage. It diagnosed my temperament perfectly:

When my application starts, it sets in motion a process by which an event is received back at the main form. It's an event that's common enough (let's say, "Maximize Window") but the first time I receive it, I have to process it in a special manner. So, I have code like this:

class MyMainForm{
  ... big long complex code ... 
  bool firstTimeThroughEventHandler = true;
  void MyEventHandler(object o, EventArgs e){
     lock(this){
        if(firstTimeThroughEventHandler == true)
        {
           firstTimeThroughEventHandler = false;
           ... one time code ...
         }
      }
   }
   ... lots more code ...
}

So this is just begging for refactoring, right? You have one-time behavior, an instance variable used as a flag, a (slight) performance hit that is not needed 99.9% of the time, etc.

But the thing is, I can't shake the feeling that anything I do to refactor it will make the code less clear. Of course I can refactor a new class to hold the event handler, and attach and detach it to the event, and, y'know, yeah, fine. But, geez, adding a class to a project introduces a mental burden, too, one that seems to me at least as great as "oh, that variable's a flag that's used by that event handler. It doesn't mean anything anywhere else."

Also, note that I don't have any other behavior in the event handler. If it were "if firstTimeThrought { code }else{ other code}" the decision to refactor would be easy. But this is trivial cyclomatic complexity: 1 entry point, 1 decision, 1 exit point.

What do you think?

What's troubling about this is that the press, in reporting this incident, jeopardizes the plan by which Cheney poses as a geriatric heart patient, lures terrorists into range, and then blasts them to hell.

It's always nice to make a blogroll cut.

But then, optionsScalper gloats about coming in "above" me, so of course I check to see how out-ranked I am.

You'd think that a guy who makes his business in derivatives trading would recognize alphabetical ordering.

Mansour Safai, an important player in the software development tools industry, has died. He was still young and my thoughts are with his family and children.

Of all the scenarios being mooted on the purchase of Borland's line of compilers and IDEs, the one that I like the most is Novell.

Novell's Mono project includes an implementation of the .NET CLI that runs on Windows, Linux, OS X, and a number of UNIXes. The Delphi group has an IDE, compilers and compiler expertise including top optimization quality, and experience with VM development. Technology wise, the two groups are highly complementary.

The only thing I wonder is if Novell has the fire in the belly to recognize that now is a viable time for an alternative to the Visual Studio-Eclipse polarity. Few people realize that the window on the next phase of development is opening now. We're entering a disruptive phase in software development (ref. Windows 3.1 and the rise of OO, the WWW and the rise of Java, the dot-com crash and the rise of agile techniques). The change in programming context to multicore will cause a disruption in software development.

Every indication is that the people involved in Borland's compilers and IDE are confident that they will carry the products forward.

I talked to a couple people and I still haven't heard of a specific suitor, but there's also a real tone of confidence.

There's already a "Delphi Corporation", but there doesn't seem to be a "Turbo Corp." I guess the Turbo brand is a thing of the past, but it was such a great friggin' name -- easy to remember, good connotations, etc. Dropping it always seemed the biggest branding mistake in Borland-Inprise-Borland's history... Oh, wait...

Today, Borland announced that they are seeking a buyer for their line of IDEs and compilers and will concentrate on their Application Lifecycle Management tools. They also announced that they're buying Segue, which on a normal day would be big news, but, my god, the end of Turbo?

This really feels like the passing of an era to me. Of course, Borland has been eclipsed (hah!) in every aspect, but Borland was such a huge part of my nascent programming / software development life and the C/C++ wars of the late 80s and early 90s so dominated my formative years in the tech magazines....

Borland is being somewhat cagey if they actually have a buyer lined up. Officially, they're saying "We're seeking..." but David I seems to feel that moving to a new company is a done deal (it may be that David I is simply in a position to retire if no buyer can be found).

I use NewsGator as my aggregator, but I think I'll have to change. The problem is that when RSS posts flow into your system as email items, desktop search for real email becomes much less useful.

For instance, searching your real email archive for words like "schedule" or "deadline" would likely result in a very relevant set of returns. If, though, your RSS reader is integrated in Outlook, that same search will turn up a hundred RSS posts for every real email message to you.

Ironically, you can search within Outlook based on folder structure, but none of the Desktop Search tools allow you to control indexing / searching. So we're back to where we were 5 years ago: One tool for searching your hard-drives, another tool for searching within Outlook.

I've confirmed that, as one of them thar jour-nye-lists, I can actually write about my experiences with the Office 12 Beta (I'm allowed to talk about client-side stuff only). I have much to say about the new task-based interface, but for my first post I have to talk about OneNote.

Whoa, baby, does this have potential. Add a reference to the Interop library in Visual Studio and you have trivially simple read-write access to XML-encoded OneNote content. How easy is it to read the pages in your Notebook? Is three lines too much work?:

 ApplicationClass ac = new ApplicationClass();
 string strXml;
 ac.GetHierarchy(String.Empty, HierarchyScope.hsPages, out strXml);
Clipboard.SetText(strXml);

Preliminary investigation shows that you get back all the needed valuable information (note flags, binary content [requires two calls,which is fine]). I haven't yet started writing new data, but expect it to be equally straightforward.

OneNote is a platform for innovation. I really think this is one of the best chances for MicroISV development we've had in years.

When I'm struggling with a hard problem, I often find myself subvocalizing the logic. It's surprising how often thinking "And therefore.." results in shaking free an elusive conclusion.

But not always. Today, as I tried to figure out some Win32 IPC problem, I found myself thinking the following thought: "And if that works, then undoubtedly that works." Big help.

Rob Bushway, blogging from Microsoft's Mobile Partner Briefing says that Ultramobile Lifestyle PCs" with a $500 MSRP, pen-based, all-day batteries, and a full OS (not CE) are coming real soon now.

Wouldn't that be nice?