RockStarProgrammer has a great article on the differences between Mercurial and git at a technical level. This is exactly the article I wanted back when I was trying to pick between the various distributed version control systems.

One common misconception that I have long since given up trying to correct is that constitutionally guaranteed free speech means that others must provide you a platform from which to spout your views. It does not. You have a right to say what you want; I have a right to tell you that you cannot do so from my lawn. You are responsible for disseminating your views, not me. So, at a high level, I don’t have a problem with Starbucks’ refusal to print the phrase “Laissez-faire” on their customized...

Steve Yegge has been working for quite some time on a way to integrate JavaScript with Emacs, allowing you to code extensions in JS rather than elisp. To that end, he recently announced the availability of js2-mode, a new mode for Emacs that brings heavily revamped syntax highlighting, indentation, and on-the-fly parsing for JavaScript code. I’ve recently been having an internal fight with myself on whether to use vim or Emacs. Although I’ve used Emacs for an incredibly long time, have a massive...

I don’t normally post chat conversations, but some are simply too good to ignore: Me: So I’m getting back into Perl. Devin: heh Devin: does your boss know? Me: ? Me: I don’t get why I’d need to notify Joel Devin: well, you know Devin: it’s like when a pilot starts drinking again Devin: the airline should be notified I think Devin may have a point.

For most of my life, I’ve been deeply involved in technology. My father taught me GW-BASIC when I was five. I had traced Smalltalk down to the bytecodes by the time I was twelve and from there to 68k assembly a year later. I insisted on disassembling most of the objects we had in the house in an attempt to figure out how they worked, and to build my own (which, unfortunately, tended not to work as well as the originals). In many, many ways, technology has defined me for most of my life. Yet at...

Not remotely related to science or technology, but this nice story of a mugging taking a beautifully positive turn is more appropriate for the end of the week anyway.

As I indicated curtly in my previous post, I’m a huge proponent of nuclear power. Though there continues to be substantial political debate whether global warming exists—largely because responding to it would be economically damaging—the overwhelming consensus of the scientific community is, and has been for some time, that global warming exists and is man-made. (See the IPCC statement, and a discussion of its significance in Nature—one of the top several scientific journals in the world, and...

I’m no fan of C++, but I look like a C++ evangelist compared to this poor chap, who assails C++ with a vengeance and eloquence that I have rarely seen. A choice excerpt: C++ is philosophically and cognitively unsound as it forces a violation of all known epistemological processes on the programmer. as a language, it requires you to specify in great detail what you do not know in order to obtain the experience necessary to learn it. C++ has taken premature optimization to the level of divine...

Yeah, that’s about right.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about the following dialog I got in Interface Builder 3 when trying to load Copilot Mac Helper’s NIB file: I mean, I guess it’s nice to have a choice, but…is this really the best UI Apple could come up with?