baxter

A couple of years ago I spent just over a year working as a mainframe developer on a System/360 set of mainframes and the author's description of mainframe development seems accurate.

I grew very fond of JCL, EBCDIC and the text editor despite, or perhaps due to, their idiosyncrasies. Not that I would ever go back ;)

This has to be the worst example of blurring out text that I can recall seeing.

Completely agreed. From the title I was really looking forward to seeing how they were going to highlight the limitations of these services. Disappointed.

Wow, it seems I have underestimated Clojure! Thanks for enlightening me :)

Perhaps with this feature we can finally use ASCII art to navigate through our code!

I found this fascinating. Does anyone have any knowledge of any other programming languages/environments that focus on time in a way comparable to that suggested in the presentation?

They don't sound far off. Wikipedia agrees with you so far :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blocks_%28C_language_extension%...

The Ars Technica review of Snow Leopard features a nice introduction to the new language feature:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2009/08/mac-os-x-10-6.a...

I'll be honest, any blog post containing the phrase "It is in this way that I outsource my disciplinary duties to Nintendo." will get an upvote from me. I urge you not to abuse this.

I wish I could upvote this more than once :)

I agree that learning how to create a programming language is a valuable lesson in and of itself -- I may even buy the book to see what it's like -- but claiming that you can create a "revolutionary" programming language within a few days conveys the wrong message.

Creating programming languages is not difficult but designing good programming languages is.

I agree, but only up to a point. Astronomers need to understand telescopes, but astronomy is about studying distant objects. The same applies to biology -- biologists are not bioinformatics specialists.

What you're describing sounds like sousveillance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance

Inverse surveillance is arguably a good way to combat authoritarian systems.

I like that, but it would make more sense if backspacing through a password didn't reveal each letter.

I agree, this should be a user choice rather than site-specific.

The HTML 4.01 spec doesn't dictate how passwords should be obscured, although it does suggest asterisks. I think it would be reasonable for browser vendors to provide an alternative means of obscuring passwords.

If the PCI auditors aren't happy with this, and given the leniency of the HTML 4.01 spec (I haven't checked any other specs), should they take this up with the W3C?