Lisp conference. An (International) Lisp conference, is coming up to San Francisco, October 27-October 31. Very tempting. Well known Lisp people will give talks. Browsing the list of speakers I found out about newLISP, a Lisp interpreter that I've never heard of before (and I thought I've seen them all). Sometimes I think that a reason for Lisp's lack of popularity is frightening number of implementations, none of them quite polished enough for really serious use (I'm talking about the free ones; the commercial ones seem to be very polished but they are also so expensive, that their price isn't even published on the web site).     

Blog song of the day.

For those about to blog,
We salut you...

     

Patents are bad for your health and software industry. Just a weekly reminder: patents are bad.     

Corman Lisp. Corman Lisp is a Common Lisp for Windows. Its new version is coming up. Can't wait to check it out.     

A new programming language. Creating a new programming language is an act of bravery. I assume that one would like his language to be popular and to overcome the momentum behind existing languages (Perl/Python/Ruby/PHP/you-name-it) is very hard. Yet some people try. GOO is a Lisp-ish/Dylan-ish language in an early, but already usable, stage of life. The encouraging thing about GOO is that its author used to (I think) work on a commercial Dylan compiler, so he should know what he's doing. Arc is a very Lisp-ish, not-yet-released for public consumption, language. The encouraging thing about Arc is that its author is a very intelligent guy who wrote 2 great books about Lisp and has interesting ideas about programming language design.     

Those are the good times. I happen to agree with Robert that:

It's actually a great time to start a company selling Web tools. The barriers to entry are low. You can find lots of great employees and lots of office space. And you can get noticed with a pretty low marketing budget.

     

You'll have a job. This excellent post presents 12 reasons why a good programmer should not worry about employment. It comes from the "I couldn't say it better myself" department. I remember discussion with other programmers where they claimed that because VB and other such tools make programming easier, there will be less work and less demand for programmers. To which I say: bull. Those tools make some programming easier but at the same time a lot of programming becomes harder (because our software gets bigger), there are tons of new software that begs to be written and every year we tend to come up with a new, uncharted territory waiting to be filled with new software (web servers anyone?, IM systems, weblog software, native XML databases, web search engines - the list goes on and on). There'll be plenty of work for good people.     

Let's spam the world. It just occured to me: bloggers are spammers. We spam the world with unsolicited opinions.     

Rackshack.net is the winner. I wrote about the hosting company Rackshack before, praising them for their cluefullness. Looks like being clueful pays off. According to those stats, they are the fastest growing web hoster. Good for them. And they're cheap too.     

Dangerous speculations. Speculations on why Danger's upcoming Hiptop/Sidekick might be successful.     

Great business without innovation. You don't need an ounce of innovation in order to have a very successful business. At least according to David Wheeler. I guess David's intention was just to show Microsoft in bad light but if you put 2 and 2 together, the inevitable conclusion is that you don't need any innovative ideas in order to have good business, sometimes even extremely good business. I guess many people (those hung up on "innovation") don't get, but it's just one of many examples that "innovation" per se is not equal to "good" or "profitable". Ideas are worthless, execution is what matters.     

Ideas are worthless. I really have a problem with people who either think that they are so great just because they've come up with an idea or people who think that a great idea is a pre-requisite for a successfully program/business/you-name-it. So I'm not going to pass up the chance to link to someone, who shares my POV:

Ideas are easy. Books are hard.

So please, repeat after me: ideas are easy; it's the execution that matters. God is in the details.     

camworld:

Weblogs should have opinions. Weblogs should have character. Tie it all up together with good information, and you've got a site people will come back to again and again.

Amen.     

Three-way merge. Rare are the times when a piece of software amazes me with how good it is. Araxis Merge just did. Merging is something that sometimes programmers need to do. People using source version control system like CVS sometimes start developing code on a new branch. At some point changes made on the branch need to be merged into the mainline code. The fun begins when there are merge conflicts that cannot be resolved automatically, i.e. if since branching the same piece of code has been modified both in mainline and on a branch. Someone has to intelligently decide which changes will survive and which ones will be dropped. Araxis Merge does an excellent job of helping doing the merge by superbly visualizing the code. Well worth it if you need to do merges.     

High tech martyr. Resume:

Company Name withheld (1995-1998)

• successfully mismanaged multiple projects for clients including Hewlett Packard, Intel, Compaq, Sony, and Toshiba
• poorly documented project status with Microsoft Project, Microsoft Excel, and Task Tracker
• communicated false and/or useless information to top-level management with PowerPoint
• accpeted full responsibilty to save Top level management the embarrassment of failure