Why some programming languages are popular and some are not..

From slashdot,
The prologue
The epilogue

Now if you wanna design a language, this link might come in handy..

Some lines from my Facebook profile..

'Don't click here' : this is on a button, guess what, the guy could have saved some html (or whatever)...
'What kind of drunk are you?' : too drunk to tell I guess..
'XYZ sent a request using werewolves/vampires/slayers' : man.. and I thought only pigeons are useful.. what next?? a 'vampire ja ja' song?? (cautionary note : non Hindi speakers might miss the last point..)
'Be a billionaire' : there is a rumor that only the site owner can click this..
'Find your inner superpower' : I have already found it, it's reading through a bunch of crap (and then blogging about it).

OK, OK, to be fair, I must admit that many of my friends enjoy all these applications (and it is one of the reasons why Facebook is so successful), but somehow I don't like all this clutter. I used to praise Orkut for its simplicity, but now they too have third party apps. It will be interesting to see how that ecosystem evolves. (On the other hand, Brooks warned us decades ago about the importance of maintaining the conceptual integrity of software projects.. but how to ensure it without restricting third party app/extension developers?).

The barber's paradox

If the barber shaves everyone in the village who do not shave themselves, who shaves the barber?

(This is the best real life example of Russell's paradox I have yet seen).

Forget Firefox..

Seems like ATT is entering the browser market with Pogo. Here is the link to the Ars review (But bear in mind that this is just a beta). Now as I am pretty sure that most of you won't follow the link (who reads a browser review?), let me summarize.. It is a 3D browser and the screenshots are pretty cool. But here is the interesting part, system requirements :- a 1.6 GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, and a video card with at least 256MB of VRAM. Yes, you read correctly, you will need a video card. Man.. many 3D games run fine below that config. The reviewers got it running on an Opteron 256 with two 3GHz CPUs, 4GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA 8800 GT video card with 512MB of VRAM, but it brought it to a crawl with just 3 tabs open. And interestingly enough, it is based on Gecko, the same rendering engine that Firefox uses. So if anybody here has a spare cluster, I would sure like to give it a try :-)

Amitabh starts blogging..

Welcome to blogosphere, Amitji!! Check out his blog, here.
(Thanks to Rohit for the link).

Bill and Dave

"Great men are almost always bad men", Lord Accton said that a long time back. But 'Bill and Dave' makes a point that this is not necessarily always the case. It is the tale of William Hewlett (Bill) and David Packard (Dave), both widely respected silicon valley icons, and their founding of HP. The remarkable thing about these guys is that there is much to learn from their lives (which sadly can't be said about some other industry icons). These are the archetypal good guys who finished first.

So here we meet Bill, a severe dyslexic in childhood, who through his persistence went on to become 'The Engineer's Engineer', and Dave, who kept his salary at a low because he did not want to exceed what Bill was making serving in WWII, even when HP was making great strides under his leadership. We also meet their longtime mentor Fred Terman, who was the first to visualize and systematically help build what today is known as 'Silicon Valley'.

Many rituals of silicon valley such as flex-time, daily coffee hour, Friday beer busts and employees working on their own projects in company time originated with Bill and Dave. And their ability to align business objectives with objectives of employees and complement each other's strengths and compensate for each other's weaknesses is all too remarkable. Such resonance is kinda rare.

Overall an interesting read, full of anecdotes. Highly recommended!!

Who says computing is hard?

Just take a look, here.

Fools, April or otherwise..

Today is April fool's day, but I did not discover any prank being played (not yet at least). Seems like the interest in all this stuff is waning (at least in the circles I frequent). Received a few all-too-obvious mails and listened to a few stories of pranks played in yesteryears. Most of such stories boil down to 'how I pretended something and made the other guy believe it'. The other guy somehow misinterpreted you. That is OK, because in the end he knows what it is all about. But can we say, except in the case of these pranks our interpretation departments work perfectly? Misinterpretation is all too common (IMHO). We misunderstand and don't know the truth. Isn't this similar to a big prank being played? So then how much sense April Fool's day makes? Are we not fools, April or otherwise?