baxter

You're suggesting he was a Lisper?

These paintings are definitely surreal but I was expecting something a little more Escher-like, like his Waterfall for example. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterfall_(M._C._Escher)

I feel compelled to point out that multiple greater than symbols do not mean "even more greater than".

I can't get the bookmarklet to work in IE8. Any suggestions?

One of the things I really like about this book is that it covers 'method_missing' really early on. This is criticised in the comments, but I don't think it's an especially difficult concept to understand.

Looks like the website is a tumblr. Not Rails?

IE8 looks the same.

This is not my area of expertise but in answer to question 1: Really hard.

Does this relate at all to linguistic relativity?

I completely agree. I posted quickly before realising these weren't daily averages (and even then, that wouldn't necessarily prove anything). I should have modified the link when I realised my mistake but unfortunately I was busy.

I hadn't come across 'munctional' before. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yH_j8-VVLo

I don't know whether to thank you or not. :)

Europe: http://www.intellicast.com/Global/Humidity.aspx?region=europ USA: http://www.intellicast.com/Global/Humidity.aspx?region=namer

Rather than store passwords or sensitive config data in a file I'll usually try to store them in an environment variable. Heroku has a little guide on this: http://docs.heroku.com/config-vars

My awesome comment counter just went up by one.

No. Karl Benz, a German, is regarded as the inventor of the first automobile.

Completely seconded.

I've read this several times now, but I still laugh when I get to this sentence:

"Lambdas are relegated to relative obscurity until Java makes them popular by not having them."

But I imagine at the time you would have still needed a computer?

Despite using some nice fonts the typography in this infographic seemed really inconsistent.

I tried to verify that the adverts used the same code, but I couldn't. Looking again I see that they do still use "DF" as the referral code, so I guess they aren't making any money from this. I take back my "spam blog" accusation! :)

A quick search led me to http://shawnblanc.net/2007/07/why-daring-fireball-is-comment...

I have to say that I think Daring Fireball is better _without_ comments. I presume that this site was set up without John Gruber's consent. This raises the question: Is this a spam blog?

WebDF could be the end of humanity.

The most extreme case I've heard of: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/81326...

This tangent is not a pleasant one, but I couldn't resist making a citation.

I've spent the day so far playing with sclang[1]. It's quite a nice language. Dynamic, OO, first class functions. Definitely worth a look, in my opinion.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperCollider#The_SuperCollider...

There's a difference between "don't be evil" and "be good".

Upvoted because I think this is a good point, but the statement "nice error pages matter" isn't backed up with any evidence. I would have loved it if there had been statistics showing how people reacted to different error messages, even though I know that kind of information might be difficult to gather.

JavaScript is a beautiful language with much more to it than just the DOM API. You seem to suggest that this is JavaScript's only strength. In fact it could be argued that the DOM API is the single greatest problem with JavaScript in the browser[1].

It's true that different languages have different problem domains for which they are well suited. I would say that projects such as Node.js[2] prove that JavaScript has applications outside of the browser.

[1] http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/2009/02/20/the_dom_stigma/

[2] http://nodejs.org/

I can't help but think of Erlang. Erlang is by no means a DSL, but it is very well suited (both in terms of language features and its Virtual Machine) to writing distributed, concurrent applications. Why manipulate a hyopthetical language so that it is functional, has message-passing, allows hot-swapping of code, enforces single assignment etc. when a language with all those features already exists? And once you have manipulated a language to that extent haven't you created another language anyway, eliminating the possible benefits of having a single, malleable language?

I really don't like the idea of one language suitable for all problems. I actually like that there are different languages that are better suited to different domains.