They will unveil my SOA with REST book as well.
Must be fun..

the point of technology and various disciplines of science (hard, soft and gooey) is to ensure the mundane human behavior, interactions, preferences and day2day stuff can yield insights about ourselves and the circles we influence….as companies start to monetize on this, the academia is off doing their one off pursuits within siloed thinking of staying within areas of expertise (within a specific subject (within a specific department (within a specific school)))..
the real transmutation of the massive pile of data from these human, social and group interactions will require marriage of minds, cross-over artists from various disciplines within science and arts and dedicate/inquisitive souls..
there is hope.

He really deserved it…

Thank you Youtube and Stanford.

via Reddit here

I havent spent much time looking at solutions of participants from this year’s ICFP contest, but the link is available for anyone else to look at here.
The important thing is the response and the level of participation. There was a neat writeup by Russel, which is a good start to see his thought pattern before jumping into each of the solutions in the projects page.

News from the International Collegiate Programming Contest - here. Other than MIT being #2, its various universities and schools from the former USSR - a l l  t h e   w a y!!

History lesson, par excellence by John McCarthy, the founder of LISP (one of the first functional languages), delivered via an interview at InfoQ.

If it werent for all the marketing and hype surrounding Java, Smalltalk would be the lingua franca for OOP enterprise-wide. Well, it seemed like with Ruby on Rails picking up steam few years ago, Smalltalk came back into limelight- when one of the Ruby developers, Avi Bryant, moved to using Smalltalk to build Seaside - a stateful web runtime. Fast forward to current, this OOP (2008) challenge was won by Smalltalk developer. Go read it here..

On a related note, my son Jay is starting his bot building using Smalltalk IDE/runtime - SQUEAK..Its a blast of a teaching and learning tool. I will post few of his projects when he gets to level0.

As an architect, I have felt that I am better of by learning to code and teach myself computer science. I know I have written about that in the past, following a rant by Steve Yegge or Zed Shaw or Joel. But there is a nicely written article (via reddit) by two NYU profs who are running an Ada company, that summarizes the views nicely. Here are some quotes that standout…

What we observed at New York University is that the Java programming courses did not prepare our students for the first course in systems, much less for more advanced ones. Students found it hard to write programs that did not have a graphic interface, had no feeling for the relationship between the source program and what the hardware would actually do, and (most damaging) did not understand the semantics of pointers at all, which made the use of C in systems programming very challenging.

and then..

Let us propose the following principle: The irresistible beauty of programming consists in the reduction of complex formal processes to a very small set of primitive operations. Java, instead of exposing this beauty, encourages the programmer to approach problem-solving like a plumber in a hardware store: by rummaging through a multitude of drawers (i.e. packages) we will end up finding some gadget (i.e. class) that does roughly what we want. How it does it is not interesting! The result is a student who knows how to put a simple program together, but does not know how to program.

Read the original for more