Dienstag, 12. November 2002

I wanna go: Details of O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conference 2003 are up. Can someone invite me..and pay....travel expenses.....please.... :-).

Mistake prevention: Frank prevents me from making a mistake later on today. I was going to do the same. Bing.

Open Source - hidden: I had an interesting chat with a consultant from a large IT company while at W-Jax last week. He was telling me about companies here in Germany that use open source solutions - but don't tell anyone. One example is a large German corporation that is using OpenLDAP to maintain the user data of 35 000 employees. Another example he quoted was of a corporation where you were not allowed to say "open source" when explaining to management what sort of software you recommend. So instead, the consultants would use terms like: "you have to accept the licence" - instead of - "you have to pay 50.000$ for a licence.".

What to learn: Lots of replies to my question from yesterday on whether to learn Ruby or Python. Thanks Ovidiu, Dominic and James. However - with the answers ranging from "learn them both" to "learn Jython or JRuby" - I am still not sure. Guido suggested Python, because its more widespread. Is that so? Coming from a traditional programming history: PASCAL, BASIC, COBOL, C, C++, JAVA (in historic order) - with some PERL and 6502 Assembler (Vic20 style) mixed in - I have a fair amount of "background". However now that I have been away from programming for a while (and some might say - "and don't come back") - these new scripting languages seem very interesting. As we move into an era that will see a shift from traditional programming models to "glueing things together" I think we (still in the traditional world) need to make sure we don't miss the boat. It may already be leaving the harbor. Anyway - I have ordered both a book on Python and on Ruby....