damon

I really wish I liked coffee. I've tried time after time to get hooked on coffee but couldn't manage to stomach it - even loaded with cream and sugar. It smells great, has ample caffeine, can be bought cheap, all the makings of a perfect drink.

Woa, I just had a year 2000 flashback!

Matthew 6:24 - You cannot serve both God and Money

Time to bring back the hand crank!

The interviewer seemed determined to get his Linux v. Microsoft sound byte. Linus has to be sick of that line of questioning.

Always make sure "this end up" is pointed away from the body!

I recommend asp.net to all my competitors!

I feel back for this guy, he seems really lonely and isolated. Life is too short to live like that, regardless of how much money you make.

I would argue a language that is eloquent, concise, and for lack of a fancier word, pretty, is important. Language features change how you view and approach a problem. I approach problems much differently in scheme given I have a macro system than I would in C. I think differently depending on the language.

And it's usually not about performance for me. I like code that looks good and is dense.

That depends on the problem you're trying to solve.

Great advice. What exciting times for the hackers accepted to interview with YC! Best of luck to all. Now listen to Matt and get working on your demo!

Minneapolis. feel free to contact me

damon at damonallison dot com

need a ruby hacker? :)

There is growing startup interest in Minneapolis. There is a group of folks (10 or 15 I believe) that are meeting bi-weekly to talk shop. Some have started, others starting. Take a look at the following links.

I hope the trend continues, I think Minneapolis has a lot to offer alpha geeks and entrepreneurs.

http://barcamp.org/MinneDemo http://groups.google.com/group/startupcamp

31 + BS in "Information Systems"

Stealing == giving artists 10% of sales.

Excellent - it will pretty much eliminate toggling between reflector and vs.net! This should greatly improve the blog post quality, documentation, books, and community feedback related to .NET.

This seems a bit out of character for Microsoft, doesn't it?

According to Guido, he wants to drop functional programming constructs in Python.

http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=98196

What's interesting is the reasons he gives:

"Why drop lambda? Most Python users are unfamiliar with Lisp or Scheme, so the name is confusing; also, there is a widespread misunderstanding that lambda can do things that a nested function can't -- I still recall Laura Creighton's Aha!-erlebnis after I showed her there was no difference! Even with a better name, I think having the two choices side-by-side just requires programmers to think about making a choice that's irrelevant for their program; not having the choice streamlines the thought process."

Basically he wants to dumb down the language to make it more appealing to the mainstream programmer crowd. He wants another java. In the end, I think that mentality is a death sentence for the language.

Breaking News : Sun Microsystems (JAVA) to change stock ticker symbol to RUBY

"The Ruby brand and technology have evolved to be among the most pervasive on the internet, yielding extraordinary awareness for Sun and opportunity for the community that leverages it," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO of Sun. "More than a billion people across the globe, representing nearly every demographic, market and industry, rely upon Ruby's security, innovation and value to connect them with opportunity. That awareness positions Sun, and now our investor base, for the future."

:)

"There is some satisfaction, however, for a faculty member in encountering a recent graduate who marvels at the light work load they carry in medical school or law school relative to the grueling schedule they had to maintain during their four years at MIT."

This reminds me of people who dropped comp sci to drink beer and scam chicks over in "business school".

Let's get Don Dodge (Microsoft is dead hater), this person, and we'll all PG hate for flash-in-the-pan attention.

My favorite:

"Let us not then, Paul, put her (straight-A student) down. She too, just as much as any homegrown entrepreneur, has worked hard and made use of her talents."

Or she drinks with the TA, or her Dad plays golf with the dean, or she's book smart, none of whom I'd probably want to hack with.

Linus is hellbent on not working with "substandard programmers" and chooses his tools accordingly. Bad programmers are really counterproductive and he's damn brilliant for weeding them out so aggressively.

In his "I'm a bastard" post to the linux kernel thread in 2000, he lambasted people arguing for a kernel debugger. His argument, clear as day, says he doesn't want to work with people who depend on the debugger , he wants people to understand the code as a whole.

"Oh. And sure, when things crash and you fsck, and you didn't even get a clue about what went wrong, you get frustrated. Tough. There are two kinds of reactions to that: you start being careful, or you start whining about a kernel debugger.

Quite frankly, I'd rather weed out the people who don't start being careful early, rather than late. That sounds callous, and by God, it is callous. But it's not the kind of "if you can't stand the heat, get out the the kitchen" kind of remark that some people take it for. No, it's something much more deeper: I'd rather not work with people who aren't careful. It's Darwinism in software development."

Here, 7 years later, he applies much the same argument to C++:

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C."

"And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap."

Call him a prick, call him selfish, call him egotistical, the bottom line is he's in charge of a product that is much bigger, more complicated, diverse, mature, and successful than the majority on the planet. Smart hackers will get past their emotion and understand his principles are sound, proven, and successful.

I think lectures are expensive. Time is expensive. In order for lectures to be effective, their value has to exceed their cost. You have two options - shorten them or improve their quality.

Speaking is an art. The value of a good lecture far exceeds text. Imagine what you'd be missing if you just read "I have a dream", not hearing MLK's delivery.

i hear you!

+1 for -1

You've got to give the guy credit for trying. His sources are sound - PAIP is difficult, and PG consistently rings true. I'd take him over a mainstream C# drone salivating over Biztalk.

I do like his update :

"A lisp hacker has rewritten my code to take advantage of more of the language's native featuresX eliminating a great deal of code in the process."

I think you can tell how successful product X is by the amount of "X killer" stories you run across with the "rewrite the rules" or "change the industry" type of hype. Google, make your phone. Microsoft, make your zune, your origami. Creative, make your $5 mp3 player. These people posting these link bait headlines and all this "could be 2008", "could have x" stuff, please.

I'd like to see a gphone. I'd like to see google release their operating system. Both products are periphery to their core competency of search it would give us a good chance to see how malleable they are.

But goodness am I tired of these speculative journalists.

OK, I'm truly sorry for posting this rant.

What's the idea? How to linkbait headlines?

Ruby is TM's driving force. I don't hack much ruby, when I do I use inf-ruby.el (based on cmuscheme.el by the way - where would ruby be without lisp and scheme ;).

I was assuming TM worked well for ruby, given how ga-ga the ruby crowd is over TM. Does ruby auto-indent and repl integration not work well in TM? Us emacs freaks will need to bring the ruby crowd up to speed with a modern editor.

This seems really out of sorts for higher education, Harvard in particular. Do their lawyers-in-training need more cases? I must admit, I would by tickets to MPAA v. Harvard. Or maybe by then I'll just watch it on "Harvard TV".

Looking through tech glasses, their give-to-get algorithm and "bartercast" algorithms could be fun to write, but they don't feel new or novel.

I honestly tried to drop emacs in favor of TextMate for hacking scheme. It has the buzz, a great philosophy with a really stand up developer hacking it, sexy integration with osx, subversion hooks, nice bundle system, file browser, intuitive shortcut keys, seemingly deep regex support, and on and on.

The issues I ran into with TM for scheme were really fundamental. While TM has both scheme and lisp bundles, they don't seem to handle code indentation nearly as well as emacs. Proper scheme indentation was mostly a manual process.

The REPL integration is also much better in emacs, in my opinion. That proves to be a huge time saver. REPL integration in TM amounted to opening up terminal.app in a separate process.

These two things - code indentation and repl support - were two things I couldn't look past. They are the bread and butter of scheme hacking. I would love to see TM improve in these areas.

If you're lisp hacking I think you'll be best served by slime/emacs. That combination is the best environment I've found.