Knowing .NET

In comments, Sun’s Charles Nutter hints that JRuby may ship by the end of year. Or he may be taking a swipe at the Perl 6 guys: you decide. Ruby on at least one of the two major managed platforms: huge for Ruby. (In that post, I caution that it took Jim Hugunin something like 2 years to move IronPython through beta to 1.0. Nutter and Thomas Enebo, the core JRuby developers, only joined Sun two months ago. A year-end release would be pretty darn impressive!)

Borland’s Developer Tools Group, including the Delphi, C++, C#, and JBuilder tools and the Interbase database tools, have been spun off into a new company called CodeGear to be headed by Ben Smith (Byte’s old tech editor?). Contrary to all previous reports, CodeGear will be a wholly owned subsidiary, not sold off.

While Alan Zeichick is skeptical about the confusion (and I share his dismissal of “ALM” as a market separate from the development tools market), I take a measure of hope in my April observation that “if Borland corporate saw a way for a self-sufficient company to keep the balance sheet in the black, it would be spinning the division out, not selling it off.”

Dr. Dobb’s Journal has taken over the Jolt Awards now that Software Development is no more. Once again I’ll be judging and, actually, serving as Moderator of the Development Environments and Languages category.

Given that we considered VS2005 last year (but, hey!, XNA) and given that Callisto is certainly going to be nominated, what other languages and development environments have or should have “Jolted” the industry in the year 2006?

IronPython went to 1.0 a few months ago. 

The re-released Turbo products? Were they just a reboxing of existing tools?

Perl 6 may beat the Dec 31 deadline, but JRuby won’t.

I wonder if I can sneak in consideration of Piet, the programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. (via Harry Pierson)

What new tools and books have helped you kick butt and take names this year?

I don’t have an HDTV and I don’t think I’m going to buy one in the foreseeable future. I watch TV every evening for a couple of hours. I like TV fine.

I have analog basic cable that requires no set-top box and for which I pay around $40 a month (it’s bundled with my cable Internet, so it’s hard to say). I live in a rural area on an island — I really doubt that I get any HD programming over the air. If I bought an HDTV, my cable rates would climb a minimum of $20 as I would have to pay for digital cable, set-top box “rental,” and an HDTV package.

Every broadcast show I watch — everything — I watch via time-shifted Tivo. If I had HDTV, I would either have to buy a new DVR ($$$) or give up 20 minutes per hour to commercials.

My favorite channels are old-time movie channels (TCM and AMC) and Comedy Central, which I don’t think broadcast in HD. My understanding is that non-HD shows look somewhere between worse-than-before to terrible on an HDTV.

I have a 27″ diagonal set. HDTVs are 16:9, so I believe that a 36″ HDTV would provide around the same picture size for broadcast TV.

I watch DVDs from Netflix. DVDs are, what?, 720P? And presumably, you can somehow set them up so that the 16:9 HDTV shows them fullscreen. So those would look better.

So, I buy an HDTV for, say, $2500. Plus maybe $50 per month in recurring charges. In order to get a no-better picture for my favorite shows, watch new HD shows with commercials and without time-shifting, and get an incremental improvement in DVDs?

<GeekTone value=”Spock”>Highly illogical.</GeekTone>

Update: I grabbed 486i from some Google search for “NTSC” but after being mocked, I double-checked. So I guess standard TV is 484i. And HDTV’s are 9:5, not 16:9? And DVDs are only ~480 resolution?