Sunday, 13 July 2003

Oh for fucks sake. Radio's news aggregator really is quite dead. I can't aggregate the freeroller feeds because they keep recurring. And now it looks like I can't aggregate MT feeds either. That, combined with the fact that Radio's programming language appears completely undocumented, I've really had enough. Blah. 8:50:03 PM

Lack of re-usability Jef Raskin: The Woes of IDEs. More modern languages, instead of becoming more maintainable, have gotten less so. This would have surprised Weinberg (see his epigram at the beginning of this piece) and should upset anybody working on or managing a project involving programming today. A prime example of this is Visual Basic (VB). A VB program soon becomes a morass of windows and requires a slog of opening and closing windows to create a program or to follow what is happening in a program. The language is largely unstructured, and writing a program is a wrist-numbing experience. Not only is the environment hellish, but also the language is frustrating to use unless your interface restricts itself to the standard Microsoft widgets. Creativity and imagination are rapidly punished; anything outside the interface norm is either inordinately difficult or impossible to do. The problems with the interface to VB and its reluctance to implement new interface widgets are especially surprising, considering that the person credited with designing VB writes books on interface design. If, like me, you ponder about the subtle relationship between programming languages and their IDEs, you should take a look at this essay. But beware: Quite a few of your favorite languages are mercilessly criticized by Jef... [Lambda the Ultimate] The big problem here is that the barrier to entry to modifying word is too bloody high. Problem with closed source code. 8:42:42 PM

Win32 build of JSR-134 (JOGL, etc) via [JavaBear] 8:40:04 PM

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