Blue Sky On Mars

• @ianlandsman because long messages are annoying. Maybe this is why Twitter has been successful with only 140 characters? #

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• Lightning Source … The Power of One
  on demand publishing, book fulfillment, ebook sales
  (tags: book business publishing service)

• @ianlandsman I predict you’ll need to shell out $499 on a new phone #
• @ianlandsman i’m thinking that the release of iPhone 2 software, new phone hardware and new sw for iPhone is likely it #

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• Web-based spreadsheets with OpenOffice.org and Dojo – Java World
  (tags: dojo ajax spreadsheet)

• Retiring Hillary’s campaign debt ($20M) means more fundraising for her. She needs to give up and stop wasting money that can go for election #
• @ianlandsman the weather we had yesterday has probably just arrived where you are (Chicago is a preview of comming attractions for me) #
• why is it that iMovie can record live from my HDV camera but Final Cut Express and Adobe Premiere cannot? #
• San Franciscans: put your name on the proposal for the George W. Bush Sewage Plant (thanks davewiner) http://tinyurl.com/3sequ3 #

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• as of r4568, TurboGears 2 now uses Paver for its builds #
• @markramm: here’s a static language rebuttal (not too convincing IMHO): http://beust.com/weblog/archives/000483.html #
• @mpirnat file a bug report. i happen to know some folks that keep up with stuff like that #
• cross-domain js is a pain #
• @voidspace xdomain js loading is possible, Dojo has an XD build: http://dev.aol.com/presentations/AjaxExperienceXDomain/index.html #
• @voidspace but some things get tricky and don’t work as easily as they do when it’s all in your domain #

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• Stevey’s Blog Rants: Dynamic Languages Strike Back
  Steve Yegge on dynamic languages and why their performance is ultimately going to rock.
  (tags: software development dynamic languages performance)

• @cgseller yes, apple kb is great. I’d recommend it. Nothing bothers me about it so far. #
• @dalmaer: LiveScribe is interesting except I don’t write things out by hand and don’t use Windows and most software folks I know are similar #
• @dalmaer yeah, i saw the bit about the Mac version coming. For what it is, their impl. does look super slick. #

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That’s a helluva canoe:

That’s my cousin, Rob Bean. He’s standing next to a 23 foot, 35 pound (!) canoe that he’s planning to paddle some 250 miles in a charity event he’s calling the Big Moo Canoe. He’s hoping to raise $5,000 for Heifer International Heifer helps to fight hunger and poverty around the world.

There’s a new language that is soon to be open sourced called Newspeak. Gilad Bracha and team are creating a new language to address what they see as the future of programming (online/offline operation, lots of service oriented design, more concurrency). They’re angling for a Smalltalk-like environment and, indeed, their current implementation is in Squeak.

Ignoring that there’s at least one other language called Newspeak, it seems like Gilad Bracha’s Newspeak is built on reasonable premises. You can read a bit about what Newspeak is like. Newspeak is definitely not done yet, but things like this give me some doubt:

note that the caret (ˆ) is used to indicate that an expression should be returned from the method, just like the return keyword in conventional languages

If I were creating a programming language, writing a sentence like that would give me pause. I would ask myself “why am I doing this differently?” If everyone in the world is using return, why choose ^? To save a few characters of typing? Really? The Newspeak document does not explain why it’s like that, it just states matter-of-factly that ^ means return.

Though they reference Self as an influence for Newspeak, they chose to go with classes rather than prototypes. That’s a good decision for adoption, because people are familiar with and like classes.

Anyhow, I think Newspeak looks interesting and it will be interesting to see how it matures. But too many arbitrary changes from “conventional” syntax are likely to hinder adoption.