My coauthor James Ward was here last weekend and we managed to debug the screencasting process and produce 6 screencasts. On his next visit we plan to finish creating a screencast for each chapter in the book.

Can a focus on C++ get me through the next twenty-odd years? Is it time to stop chasing bright, shiny new languages and consolidate as a guru? A few thoughts on "legacy languages" and the later stages of a coding career.

The internet takes a formerly-expensive cost (communication) and drives it to essentially zero. Any activity where communication is important is being disrupted. To find out how much, drive the result as far to the extreme as possible.

Scala has an Option type that provides a type-safe alternative to using null to represent optional values. In this blog post, I show how to replace nested conditionals involving Option with a for-expression.

There's a saying that's been traveling the business circles in recent years: "Speaking truth to power." It means you are so confident and direct that you can actually tell someone in power what's really going on.

This is the updated translation of a beginner-level paper I wrote for Stacktrace one year ago (see http://stacktrace.it/articoli/2008/05/gestione-dei-record-python-1/). It basically discusses Python 2.6 namedtuples (plus some musing of mine).

A quick recipe for readers of digital comics

A recent paper by Gilles Dubochet describes a study that concluded Scala code written in a functional style that favors for expressions and higher order functions is easier to comprehend than Scala code written in a more Java-like, looping style. It also found that meaningful variable names were insigificant or even detrimental to comprehension.

My prediction of how Chrome -- both the browser and the OS -- is going to flatten the playing field for programmers.

This summer I have been quite silent on Artima. Here is an update of what I have done and what I plan to do in the future.

The kind of thing I've been talking about: time-share restaurants, edupunk and microlending.

The Linux Outlaws podcasters interviewed me when I gave a keynote at EuroPython.

In hindsight, it seems strange it has taken us so long to figure this out in the computing field. Applications elsewhere might be even more important.

Remember when you were a kid, hanging upside down over the couch? Everything you looked at was different.

SourceForge.NET's new File Release manager takes computing productivity back to the days of the punched card reader, and it does it with Web 2.0!