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Is it possible to create an equally powerful modern programming environment with reduced complexity (as measured in pages of documentation or whatever)?

If Apple, or someone else, were able to it would be a competitive advantage.

I'm not suggesting that Apple hasn't already done so, but I don't have the first hand experience to make the comparison myself.
I wish there were more LPs available out the door: I don't like the current selection, but I'd kill for a Tubular Bells LP done in this vein.

I can't wait till this catches on and there are thousands of LPs to pick from. This is the sort of extra functionality that makes buying music rather than stealing it worth the consumer's money.
I dumped Linux, although I still use it in the cloud. And rather than saying "dumped" it would be more accurate to say I decided to NOT use a PC laptop with Linux, instead getting a Mac.

Why? Not for any of the reasons mentioned. One of the big things that convinced me was a little thing, the magsafe connector. I've seen laptops slammed down on the floor, and it's not pretty. Endless driver issues were another reason, but the magsafe was the clincher. That alone is worth the price difference.

So sometimes the reasons are not related to software. The larger context matters, including little things in that larger context.
This brought a smile to my face. Very impressive and well worth a read.
"""I am not convinced that very many people care about discovering new events in the first place, at least not events that don't have an immediate impact on one's social status."""

My definition of an event is: A social gathering of my friends, or friends of friends. I don't care about random trivia nights, but I might check them out if my immediate friends are going to them.

I believe that an "event community" is a misguided notion. Going to the same event as a perfect stranger is not a strong enough context for socialization.
PHP is the BASIC of web development, nothing to configure, no main routines, just type and run.

echo "Hello world";

and from there all the functions you may need to do whatever you want.

Beautiful? hell no.

Simple? enough to have millions of wannabe coders doing wonders on the web with just a $5 hammer and a box of nails.
Sponty actually does this. When you change the details, it emails everyone. On an iPhone, email is just as good as SMS. People compulsively check their email on their iPhones.
It's really simple for me...

1. I write everything down in an unlined spiral notebook with perforated detachable pages.

2. I file every page into a labeled green file folder in a file cabinet.

3. I keep all of it.

I've been doing this for 30 years. I have everything I ever wrote. If fills 3 two drawer file cabinets.

I don't print and save anything which is already stored digitally. I hardly save much else.

About once a month I pull out a folder a go through it. Obviously, there's a lot of stuff that appears to be of little use now, but I never fail to find something of value.

I give away or donate any that is replaceable (which includes all books). But not my own writings. I don't remember how I handled that issue 12 years ago, but I do know that I can find all my notes on it pretty quickly. This way I don't have to remember every detail, but I always have my younger self and much of my experience as a resource at my disposal.
> I honestly don't believe that if you charged for OpenOffice.org, Inkscape or The Gimp then people would prefer them over their closed source equivalents.

I'm not saying this.

I, for one, prefer Gimp and Inkscape over Photoshop and Illustrator. I have coded my own plugins for Gimp and I write my own scripts (in various languages) to output svg (using Inkscape for additional free hand editing).

But I know that I'm not the average designer/sw user.

Apache and Linux are for tech-savvy users.

> Open-source software isn't automatically better than proprietary software.

This is obvious. What I'm saying is that, for most people, the opposite is true, because there's a psychological bias which is independent of technical value, user friendliness etc.
"we hear more from the Ruby side than any other about how great their language is"

Um, that crown unquestionably goes to a big chunk of the python community right now. Reddit alone provides a steady stream of both extreme fawning over python and vitriol targeted at ruby, and your comment and its upvotes demonstrate that it's present here, as well.

It's also quite a colossal double standard to complain about Ruby-specific hosts considering the existence of GAE, all the django-targeting hosting companies http://www.google.com/search?q=django+hosting and all the companies providing language-specific services for PHP, Java and every other mainstream language.
I'm pretty sure they're not using much metadata, but instead using collaborative filtering based on the libraries other iTunes users.

"Apple's proprietary recommendation engine that uses collaborative filtering and iTunes' built-in rating system to generate music recommendations"

from http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/03/24/apple_switches...
I think the Rails super-over-loaded Do-What-I-Mean method would become more popular. Last night I tried to futz around with some of the form helpers, and almost every parameter is optional. It makes for some pretty challenging parameter munging at the beginning of the methods... but usually when coding there is a particular method you call, and you just kind of pile things on. (The plethora of form helpers notwithstanding)
No, but it does put the number in perspective. The amount of kidnappings by non-custodial parents is in the 100000's a year.
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I find it interesting that nearly all the comments here are on Tornado vs. Twisted rather than the larger issue of communicating vs. coding that the author brings up.

There've been a lot of times - most recently yesterday - when I've hacked up a solution, mailed it off, and got back a response of "I just did this a couple days ago. With a one-line change, my code could've covered your needs too." And then of course I'm like, "Oh. Shit. Let's modify your code instead and I'll throw away my changelist."

I get the feeling this happens a lot outside of my own personal/professional sphere as well. Google's famous for its NIH syndrome. Python's got about 5 different competing web frameworks. Lots of people still write their own machine code generators instead of using LLVM. I'm kinda curious how much coding people are willing to do to save one e-mail.

Ironically, the folks who insist on building their own stuff are often right. Google's certainly done well for itself, and it's great that we can use Django instead of Zope now. So maybe the problem is that communication really is so expensive that people are better off rewriting large chunks of code to avoid it. But if that's true, we should be looking for ways to reduce the cost of communication, rather than glorifying the folks who go to heroic measures to avoid it.

It's curious - yesterday, Coders at Work was at the top of the hotlist, and most of the comments said, "I'd rather learn about the business & management aspects than the technical aspects." Yet here's an interesting business & management problem, but everyone's commenting on the technical aspects.
that sort of grad school is for people who need their hands held to learn things.
And never trust Donald Knuth!
Can a Programmer be a Decent Graphic Designer? - Here's Some Tips
I can't seem to get Hurl to send application/json content. Any ideas?

A few minutes later: everything seems to give the error:

Cannot allocate memory - fork(2)
In that sense, Firefox is a "rewrite" of IE.
I built something similar to this in python once, which was kind of fun. Instead of 1 (alive) or 0 (dead), it was 1 (blue colony), 0 (dead), -1 (green colony), and things spawned as a summation of their neighbours. What this meant was the playing field cleared out quite suddenly, but man it could be a colourful explosion! I think with some good thought and a fun interface this could be a really amusing way to spend a weekend.
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There was another article I read a year or two ago about how the Designer / Programmer was the elusive holy grail for many companies. I can't seem to find that article, but I figured this had some solid advice. As a designer that struggles to program, rather than vice versa, there are some solid tips here.
When the invention in question is core to your product, sometimes it does make sense to do it yourself. See Joel Spolsky's essay "In Defense of Not-Invented-Here Syndrome": http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000007.html
To me, a lot of this is what the "design" process is for. You have a certain set of requirements that you need to fulfill, so before you set about coding it, you enumerate how it is possible to implement it. Now, I won't go into details like "Use a System.Web.UI.WebControls.Label here", but if it's something that I know my peers don't have much experience with (like apparently the entire System.Drawing namespace, dammit), then I'll specifically indicate in the design that that is an option. It makes for a much more streamlined process for development. No, it doesn't answer all of the questions that come up in coding, but it certainly slays the big dragons.
But also "How can you argue against ‘just in case’"

Will society really forgive the responsible person if really something happens? I hope I would let my kids walk to school, but I think there is some kind of "tragedy of the commons" at work here. It's also why there will always be more and more stupid laws (like security cameras everywhere, privacy on the internet and so on) - because if you reject a law that is supposed to enhance security, you could be blamed if something happens.
... yeah, I can't see that name catching on in the US.
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Today is the last chance to send in your opinion on Canadian Copyright law reform. Email to info@copyrightconsultation.gc.ca .
More info:
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The “Great.” is entirely non-sarcastic. Funny how “Great.” has come to denote sarcasm. I would guess that is why I was downvoted. If you mistake my “Great.” for sarcasm the comment is indeed vile. My mistake.
On Prototyping: The Simplest Solution Never Comes First
You'll have to elaborate on that. When I'm not on an internship, I'm supported by NSF grants to do my research. The support isn't much, but it's enough to pay rent, groceries and a few other things.

The general area of research I do is of interest to many companies in industry, but what I do specifically is usually not. Put another way, most companies would not pay me to do what I'm doing. Being a grad student gives me the freedom to spend 50-60 hours a week on research that I find interesting, but may not directly benefit anyone financially. This circumstance is unique to people in academia, some industry research labs, and people wealthy enough that they no longer need to work for a living.
Www.Thump.in - Ad reviews by consumers
What do you think of a common place (www.thump.in) for reviewing ads? Do you think consumers will take to sharing opinions and would that help marketeers to better communicate and interact?
This type of applications reminds me a bit of the Moodstats — http://moodstats.com , from way back in 2001 (if I recall correctly).

Built by the Cuban Council - http://cubancouncil.com - in Macromedia Director.
An exclamation mark helps - "Great!"
Hey tokenadult, are you homeschoolers for primarily religious reasons, or primarily non-religious reasons? If the latter, please consider writing up a blogpost or a comment here about your experiences, what works/what doesn't, what's your view on the "but won't they lack social interaction", any regrets etc.

(I don't mean to offend you if your reason is religious by the way; it's just that I suspect not many people here will share it).

I'm a fresh parent, living in a country where homeschooling is lawful, but very difficult to arrange, and viewing with dismay some of my options a few years down the line.
An intriguing hypothesis. It would seem sensible to suppose then that Canadians are a people so paralyzed with fear that all their children are homeschooled and they communicate with each other only over the Internet, looking at the gun laws in that country.
I have no idea whether non-custodial parents are primarily to blame -- these stats cited by ABC News just say family members or parents.

"203,900 kids were abducted in 1999 by family members or parents. Approximately, 58,200 were 'non-family' abductions — only 115 were defined as the frightening kidnappings by strangers." -- http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=91365&page=1

Unless almost all of the family cases are non-custodial parents, your claim of hundreds of thousands seems a bit exaggerated. Some of these must be custodial parents, uncles, grandparents, siblings, and so on.

I think 'non-family' means acquaintances, minus the 115 cases of abduction by a stranger.
Context matters: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04...

Further, it's easier to point someone to a blog post than a forum comment.
No, he was helpless, and you were the bandit.
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Probably never, because they'll marginalize your child in their disapproval of you. It's valuable for children to start from a decent status in their peer group.
You can't guard your children from the one-in-a-million. You have to let go at some point. Hard as it is.

This is a good topic for communities to discuss.

One of the best things I have found since moving to a different country is our kids can travel (on their own) safely and freely to school and back without us being judged as irresponsible.

The more kids that do it, the safer it is. Good on these people for going first, I hope others follow.

Here's a relevant article from Aus where the coroner recommended banning 4WDs (SUVs) from near schools: http://fddp.theage.com.au/news/national/coroner-urges-curbs-...
Are you talking about the 115 abductions by strangers? Can you even get statistically significant results out of that small sample?
PHP became such a huge success for a few reasons. It's easy to deploy. You just have .php files that execute code in <? ?> tags. It has a bunch of framework-type things built in such as all the database connector functions, session handling, and it returns HTTP responses easily.

What really bothers me about this article is that the author goes after Rails without knowing anything. He says that Rails is slow. That simply isn't true when compared to PHP frameworks. Rails is many times faster than CakePHP. And Rails has a ton more features. It's all well and good to just spout off that Rails is slow, but actual investigation proves that in the real world it isn't true.

See: http://video.merbcamp.com/public/katz3.mp4
http://avnetlabs.com/php/php-framework-comparison-benchmarks

Lerdorf doesn't even seem to know that scaffolding really isn't Rails. He just comes off as someone who doesn't actually know or get the technological landscape.
Pedibus is Latin for "by feet".
My letter can be found here:
http://christopherolah.wordpress.com/2009/09/12/my-letter-to...
Feedback is appreciated. It hasn't been sent yet.
I could bet Powershell sucks because of too much "marketing expertise", much like Windows itself.
A good chunk of the time, it's the result of a divorced/estranged parent trying "get" their child back.
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I'm sorry to bother you. But this negativity caused because of you media, your state politics, your peoples reactions.
It does not come from thin air.
The Japanese also make their children clean up their classroom, which I think is great. In my country, Brazil, parents have fits if someone suggests something like that. It is likened to slave labour.
Yeah you guys crashed it :P

I'm workin' on bringing it back up.
Putty is an excelent terminal, but that's it. For everything else, you are stuck with either a Windows command prompt (which is atrocious) and to have your civilized environment on other machine (usually not reachable when you are, say, on a plane).

The clunky Cygwin terminal (a bash running inside a Windows text window) is a thing of the past. I urge you to try either MinTTY (which is part of Cygwin) or Poderosa (mentioned in a comment to TFA) as shell environments.

Since I never used PuTTY as anything beyond a terminal, I don't know what magic it can do beyond what MinTTY does, but, since decent set of command-line environment is a requirement for me, PuTTY doesn't make life under Windows bearable.
I don't think that Lerdorf (btw, not Lerforf) doesn't know what he's talking about.

He's just saying that frameworks like Rails are inherently slower, and all the magic (like scaffolding etc.) isn't really worth it.

He also says:
> Ruby as a language is great, I think it's a really clean and nice language. There just aren't that many people who know it well.
uses google charts to generate charts. that's what i use on a similar project (also flot). i was hoping to see something with a little more javascript interaction. i have the same problem exploring Felton's reports: jumping around is jarring. would rather see mouseovers and zoom ins. ultimately, looking at a really big poster, one that makes sense at different scales when standing 20ft away and 2ft away, is probably the best experience. i want to capture that through a web browser somehow. ideas...?
I don't know if this is "beautifully designed" - more like "sparsely and starkly designed, which conforms to someone's particular idea of beauty".
The three emails I can read by clicking through to that link don't seem overly abrasive.
The problem with that is that you only can access the decent environment (the beastly Linux box) from a place with good connectivity. I find it invaluable to have a stand-alone working environment inside my computer for those times the network is not available (or I don't want to be easily reachable or tempted to open the browser and come here).
From your snarky remark it would seem sensible to conclude that you are not aware that Canadian schoolchildren don't seem terribly more likely to be walking to school than their American counterparts.

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/131723.php
I'm sorry. I will never use an adjective again. For the record, I don't think the design is sparse or stark. For me, sparse is something like NowDoThis, and stark is something like Daring Fireball. But if it conforms to your particular ideas of sparsity and starkness...

The front page isn't the wow factor here. The profiles are absolutely beautiful. Check out http://www.daytum.com/feltron. Then check out the bar graph on http://www.daytum.com/feltron/page/10835, and see what happens when you hover over elements. There are a few dozen different output options available, and they're all displayed terrifically. The interface for the logged-in user is similarly unique and beautiful. It's a perfect example of an interface that's interesting and singular not because it's trying to be particularly aesthetic but because its goals require a unique approach.
I figure that the kidnappers are a red herring. Parents do think about them, and do mention them in conversations about their kids walking to school. But i figure that the "closer" in the discussion is the idea that our little kids are walking across busy streets unsupervised.

We're not totally irrational. We know our kids aren't going to get stolen off the street. But it's hard to dispel the idea that they could get hit by a car. Because they totally can.

A 9-year-old crossing a street implicates two very scary variables: the fucking morons driving down our residential streets at 40mph to get around traffic on the main drags, and the fucking morons we've kept alive for 9 years who will still occasionally run out into the street without looking.
We previously had a poll here of which languages have the best "innards" or something like that.

I wonder what a similar poll on languages with the best "outards" would be (i.e. documentation, learning curve, simplicity of initial setup, time from total n00b to achieving your first actual goal, friendliness of the community, etc.)

While I don't enjoy PHP as a language, it clearly excels at all of the above. I'm not surprised that it has a large user base.
That number is such a lie. The true number is exponentially higher. Most cases go unreported by the authorities so as not to terrify the communities in which they occur. My friend, whose son was about 30 seconds away from being abducted in grocery store parking lot here in San Diego, was told by the police that approximately 30 children a year go missing in San Diego alone (many of which are taken over the border and sold.) You think all those children on milk cartons are living in hiding with their "non-custodial" parents? This problem is so much larger than anyone wants to accept.
If you don't like someone's code, and the time cost of communication with them to change the code upstream is likely to stop you from meeting deadline (or they have a different final vision), creating something tailored to your own needs is the only solution.
I get what you're saying. Felton's primarily a print designer; his report is designed for print purchase. I didn't have the same problem with this site, though—what did you find jarring?
Your first bullet point hits the nail on the head. Yes, this is the sad reality of many event-related sites today. There are some who avoid it by being super-exclusive and private, but that's another story.

I will disagree about the calendaring thing. Perhaps my friends are all overscheduled Bay Area people but we do use calendars outside of work. Furthermore, promoters and venue owners do have to use something like a calendar tool, eventually, and that is a potential gateway to grabbing good event data and republishing it. I don't know of anyone that's courting this side of the market well. Offering these people the carrot of better tools plus the even tastier carrot of automatic connections with fans, syndication, promotion, might work.
The article shows how to figure out where you are failing in a large government project. You would think that someone somewhere would learn that large monolithic-fix-all-our-problems-and-replace-all-our-antiquated-systems-at-once projects are doomed to failure. There are enough examples out there to satisfy anyone. Having done modest by comparison government systems, I can tell you that you cant get everything down on paper at the beginning. You have to be prepared for change.

Paperwork is the killer. Requirements are the killer. Design is the killer. They should start with something achievable and evolve into the desired system incrementally. The problem is that the tools necessary to achieve the task arent there. Government software is full of exceptions, special cases, union rules and all that stuff and we dont really have the tools to encapsulate the idea of special cases that can flow through the system.
Gloob, can you expand on this?
I love how the article is called "Why F#" but then just extols the virtues of functional programming. I suppose more articles on FP are always a plus... However, here is a bit that should be in the article but is missing:

"Why not F# for Functional Programming?"

- It's created by Microsoft, who will drop a technology like a wet stone when it's no longer profitable and abandon developers relying on the platform.

- If you find a bug in F#, you have to pray Microsoft deems it worthy to be fixed.

- You can't learn about how F# works by studying the source code of the language.

- You have to spend lots of $$ to be able to program in F#.

- Haskell is more elegant and has a more robust community.

- You can run your code only on a Windows machine (reliably.)

There are arguments you could make defending F# as a choice (libraries, etc) but this article doesn't address those issues.

UPDATE: Ok Ok... I admit F# has decent support on other platforms at this point.