Knowing .NET

I assume that this is a joke / conceptual art statement but it does remind me of the thought processes of young nerds that are so failure-prone: “If only I elaborate the logical inconsistency of the bully’s statements, he will no longer have the temerity to call me names!”

On the other hand, Halloween is coming up.

P.S. I think I will keep this image handy in case I ever give a talk on exception handling. “You don’t want to do a lot within an exception handler. The more complex your exception handler, the more possible it is to to create a defect or failure-mode within your exception handling process…”

Via Sue Schmitz comes the sad word that Alex, the amazing Gray Parrot whose cognitive abilities were literally incredible, has died. Supposedly (there I go with the doubt), he had a vocabulary of 150 words, could count recognize quantities up to 6, could identify 50 objects, understood concepts such as “bigger” and “smaller,” and knew better than to call virtual methods within constructors.

I’m not surprised that Wikipedia has criticisms, but even there it only actually quotes one direct criticism, which in context (in the referenced NY Times article) is pretty clearly simply skepticism, not a repudiation.

Is this a strictly true statement? 

“One can freely download command-line compilers for all Microsoft languages and never use Visual Studio.”

Specifically, don’t you need VS to develop for Smartphones and / or Windows Mobile?

With the release to public beta of Popfly, Microsoft’s mashup editor, I’ll reiterate my theory that mashups are the UNIX shell of the Internet. The corollary is that we need a suite of command equivalents:

Right now, everyone’s concentrating on what output the mashup editors can produce or what the component manipulation looks like. I think the winner of the mashup evolution will be the one that provides the most flexible suite of components.

I’m tempted to label as “shocking” the announcement that F# will become a product fully integrated into Visual Studio, but I suppose it would be hard for anyone to ignore stuff as compelling as this.

F# is a derivative of OCaml and is a functional programming language. Those who delve into my language-related or concurrency-related posts will be familiar with the concept that one of the great advantages of functional languages are characteristics that lend themselves to automatic parallelization. Microsoft is making more and more noise about functional approaches (Eric Lippert’s “aside” that “Immutable data structures are the way of the future in C#.” is telling.) and this endorsement of F# is another sign that Redmond is throwing its weight pretty heavily behind this approach.

F# has been well-received among the hardcore language nerds but you have to give Microsoft credit for getting out ahead of the market on this one. F# is a very different beast than the Iron* languages (Python and Ruby). This isn’t Microsoft reacting to market demands, it’s Microsoft putting a not-at-all-well-known language into the spotlight.

I know I should qualify this with “of course, it’s terribly irresponsible. If someone had died, what kind of possible excuse…” etc.

But he didn’t kill anyone, so I’ll just point to the link:

http://www.wired.com/cars/coolwheels/magazine/15-11/ff_cannonballrun?currentPage=all

This must have been bitter-sweet. Sure, you want to get your rocket back, but talk about going out in a blaze of glory…

A well-written reiteration of the premise that complexity is an essential, not accidental, aspect of software construction. [via links for 2007-10-03 Bill de h?ra ]

[C]omputer-science grads saw their average starting salary offers grow by 4.5 percent last year alone. The new average salary for a job right out of college is now $53,051. That’s the highest amount this decade.

Starting salaries surge for computer science grads [Ars Technica]

Interesting. I still think that the future is mixed-at-best for United States programmers (with our relatively high cost), but at least for now there’s some good news.

The only thing that’s worse than ignoring a cause is doing something absolutely trivial and patting yourself on the back about it. Apparently if you blog about the environment today, you’ve done your part. I think there was a day last week when you were supposed to alter your CSS style sheets to decry the slaughter of monks in Burma.

You want to do something for the environment? Don’t blog about how much you love pandas: reduce your waste stream. You want to support the troops? Don’t put a sticker on your SUV: drive a high-mileage car.