AndrewO

That's a pretty cavalier attitude to have when so much depends on the results (and I mean research programming in general, not just the CRU case). Maintainability may not be a concern, but verifiability certainly should be.

Agh, sorry: out of gold stars. Does an upvote work?

(BTW, that totally made my day. I love HN... :)

A gold star to the first person who posts a link to Caecilius and Metella's house.

There's something about Scaled Composites' style that's so cool. I'm sure functional characteristics come first, but their planes seem to have an unmistakable style of their own. I'd love to hear about their design process and how much thought goes into the aesthetic or if it's a natural consequence of their materials and project constraints.

Glad I read this. I'd assumed Node.js had something to do with the Nodebox visualization environment on Javascript (I think a project like that has been featured here before). While that would be interesting and pretty, it wouldn't be my cup of tea right now.

This, however, looks really cool. I've been waiting for a compelling JS server side framework for awhile—definitely going to have to check it out. I hope other people aren't making the same mistake.

Anything instrumental and epic sounding. Right now my favorites are:

* Explosions in the Sky

* Red Sparowes

* British Sea Power's Man of Aran Soundtrack

I'd also recommend a band called Souvenir's Young America which sounds like the soundtrack to a zombie/western movie.

The fact that templates are functions that use actual parameters (rather than backdoor means like instance variables) looks to be a huge win for me.

Are there any touchpads currently on the market that would support this?

I think I'd like to see the touch elements on each side of the keyboard rather than below—the positioning seems more natural and having to raise your arms to type seems like it would get really annoying.

Other than that, this looks like a novel idea for liberating ourselves from the tyranny of the mouse and window clutter.

I really hope this turns out better than DOM (both design and implementation).

At least good libraries should arrive more quickly given that the number of good Javascript developers out there is so much greater than it was in 1998.

On-demand virtual hardware and storage is Infrastructure as a Service. I'd be willing to bet that most developers think of that when they think of the cloud (since, as you point out, they're actual users of the cloud).

But then some marketer somewhere (I'm guessing Salesforce, but that's my own bias :) decided that any web application could call itself "Cloud" (since "Software as a Service" was no longer cool. Again, I'm blaming Salesforce for flogging that horse to death...). This way, even normal people can use the cloud/buy cloud services, and it's just as easy as using the Web since it's really just the Web! (Way to go, smart and savvy Internet^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCloud user—you're so much smarter than everyone else and can expect to get promoted over/laid more than your coworkers still using that ancient Web 2.0!)

The Wikipedia article on Cloud Computing is a good illustration on how vague the term has gotten, especially how ill-defined all of the sub-classes are: Platform as a Service, Application as a Service, Service as a Service. Pretty much anything on the Web can be made into a definition of "cloud" somehow.

I'd really like to see Cloud Computing only applied to things involving immense elastically scalable computing and storage that can be provisioned and taken offline immediately, but I don't think that's going to happen. The meaningfulness of the term has been destroyed by the rampant "me-too"-ing of the industry.

> you can store the HTML, JS and the data all in CouchDB

I think you're talking of CouchApp, which allows you to create apps like that on top of CouchDB. Of course, if that was the maximum of what one was trying to do, one could get similar functionality from an RDBMS, some simple routing rules, and a CGI script that served content straight from the DB.

I guess my point is that there's not really anything intrinsic to CouchDB that makes this possible: it's a pretty short and inviting conceptual leap from "this DB does everything through an HTTP interface" to "I can run my entire application from this DB". My worry (and I'm not accusing the parent of this) is that that misses out on all of the other things that CouchDB offers (especially the ability to merge DBs that have been disconnected for long periods, which often gets lost behind the HTTP interface and MapReduce hand-waving).

The <ins> and <del> tags have always seemed weird to me in that they talk about the document's history, rather than the document itself, or what the document is talking about. The problem I've always seen with using them for version control is, what happens when the document you're trying to version control has <ins> and <del> tags?

I suppose you'd have the same problem if you put a diff under version control, but it seems like this kind of thing implies that there should be something different about those tags (I'd say another namespace, but those have been abused enough already).

I don't know how/if I'd solve this, I'm just wondering if anyone else feels the same.

Agreed.

And I like Erlang, but I'm a bit tired of that graph. It's very impressive, but I've seen so many articles parading it around as Exhibit A for why Erlang is great. Now they usually make other points with other evidence, but I think a lot of people stop at the graph and come out with a very shallow understanding (and are let down when Erlang doesn't turn out to be a panacea).

Also, it should be noted that the article is more than 2 years old.

Oh no! Now how will I break my trainees' brains by having them unravel Camping?!

The first rule of Code Club, is you do not tweet about Code Club!

Me too! I seriously thought that this was going to be a howto about some new Google API called Book Deal that had Lawyer and Author objects until I saw it was on nytimes.

Well, I hope that didn't come across as being diametrically opposed to you or anything. I actually quite agree that Apple is profit-driven. Its success has mainly stemmed from learning how to profit on its design.

Apple's most successful products have been those where its best to market, rather than first to market, which by means competition is good for it by definition (most especially at the beginning). Creative Nomad and (soon at least) WinMo are evidence of that (on the other hand, there's Newton, which was way too early to market).

It remains to be seen whether or not their more successful products fall into a MS Word-like malaise (see my other comment) now that they're entrenched in the media player and smart phone spaces. My guess is that the design that has driven them to success in the past will continue to be able to head off competition, but I don't want to sound like a fan boy.

So mainly, I was disagreeing that a monoculture could be in their best interest. It may in certain cases (or other companies), but I don't think it does on average.

I disagree with the parent, but don't think he should be downmodded (at least not below 1 as it is now). He's making a point which goes against what most people here probably have, but it's prompted more discussion and was made civilly.

> If Apple has no competitor, they'll continue to innovate...

I immediately thought of MS Word when this sub-topic came up. Since establishing its dominance in, let's say 1997 or so, few features have come along that have truly changed the way that users word process (the last one for me was JIT spell checking). But MS has been adding more and more features in an attempt to continue innovating.

There's a Word monoculture and there's innovation of a sort. I think the interesting point that you make is that it's unfocused innovation that seems to be either incremental or aimed at preempting possible minor complaints, rather than exploring new ways for users to create documents. Not that I'm critiquing MS specifically of this—I think this may be a general symptom of monopoly (and I wonder if the same would hold for Apple).

Dude, you totally harshed the mellow in here. Now he's gonna be all paranoid...

My guess is it's going to be called the Newton ][.

Yeah, let's not forget this is the guy we're talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAWDYaWAVQQ ("John Dvorak admits to baiting Mac users for hits")

Keep those clicks coming in!

<awed_whistle/>

Makes me think of the beginning of Ghostbusters (although IIRC that was Columbia's library).

Personally, I recommend a quiet corner of a 5 star hotel lobby/bar that has free wifi and accommodating doormen. Our first 2 or 3 weeks we camped out on the mezzanine overlooking the lobby of a not-to-be-named fancy hotel in DC (interspersed with on-sites at a nearby client's).

The best part was when the piano player started at 5:00 we knew it was about time to wrap up (and sometimes grab a scotch). That was a good way to end a day.

Libraries, however, are a great choice for telecommuting (especially when home is full of temptations for distraction).

Definitely agree.

However, one thing to be aware of is that a lot of parents use libraries as excursions/free daycare and librarians are reluctant to yell at kids. Not that I blame either of them (good job, parents. Let's get those kids reading early!), but have some headphones for when the usual decorum breaks down.

Still, it beats the over-commercialized folk music and hissing espresso machines of the coffee shop.

His wife's in a coma.

This just in: someone writing for a newspaper thinks the world is moving too fast. Why am I not surprised?

In your opinion, why do you think they stay away from HN or Stack Overflow? Is it just that there's nothing there for them specifically or would you say that they're (on average) less interested in the wider programming ecosystem?

I've never met a COBOL programmer. The only times I've seen actual COBOL code have been examples to show how inscrutable it can be (like the example in the article). I haven't seen any open source software written in COBOL, although I'm sure there has to be something. Yet, I know COBOLers are out there.

Given the fact that COBOL refuses to die and not for lack of other options, I've always assumed there's something that kept these guys going. I used to think it was just hard-headedness ("Haven't these guys heard of Python or Ruby or even like Java or .Net or something?!?!"), but age and experience have lead me to believe that it probably has something to do with the size of the paycheck.

So I'd really like to know:

Do COBOLers have a community of any sort?

Where do they go for help?

Do they read HN or proggit (or do they have their own portals that only run on green screens)?

What keeps them going (and do they actually despise their language but just suck it up)?

Are they locked away in the dungeons of enterprise IT departments (or are they more like the wizards in a tower)?

Is there some sort of annual conference where they all meet and dance in front of a bonfire (lit from the heat of their mainframes) and sacrifice young virginal (pure? dynamic?) OO or functional languages to keep their own alive?

It was nice to get an alternative to the idiocracy theory that we're getting stupider because stupid people are having more kids. That sort of thinking is doomed to turn a grave social problem into a two sided us-vs-them culture war.