Lisp is often promoted as a language preferable over others because it has certain features that are unique, well-integrated, or otherwise useful. What follows is an attempt to highlight a selection of these features of standard Common Lisp, concisely, with appropriate illustrations.

Besides improving application startup time, .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 also allows developers to add a splash screen to WPF applications. The splash screen is shown using native code, even before WPF application starts to load. In reality this means the splash screen would show immediately when application is started, and fade away a couple of seconds later, when application is fully loaded and main screen displayed.

I've found a ton of bugs in gcc over the last 5 years of working on Factor, and Factor only has 12,000 lines of C. This is one of the reasons I've been striving to minimize the amount of C code in the VM; gcc is simply not dependable enough for me.

With the last git release, git-rebase gained a new option: --interactive. If you already had the feeling that in a patch series of yours you should have ordered patches differently, or merged some, then this command is what you dreamed of. Here is how it works…

A patent scheduled for sale next month in San Francisco could threaten some of the biggest players on the internet leading Web 2.0. Listed in Ocean Tomo's spring auction catalog as lot number seven, patent number 6,418,462: "Discloses methods allowing clients to perform tasks through a sideband communication channel, in addition to the main communication channel between a client and server".

Apple has just sent a form letter to an army of would-be iPhone developers - and no one knows what it means. Some, like the folks at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, think it's a mass rejection letter telling all but a handful of select developers they're banned from Apple's fledgling iPhone Developer program. But others argue that it could be a we'll-get-back-to-you letter that's easily mistaken for a rejection letter.

Microsoft hopes to deliver the .NET-tuned implementation of the phenomenally popular Ruby, IronRuby 1.0, by the end of this year. There's a ton of work left between then and now, though, and project manager John Lam isn't falling for that old Redmond trick of committing to a date and then watching the software slide out of view. Some stuff is getting cut, though.

While Ruby and Groovy seem to get all of the attention, there's one scripting language that has been around for a lot longer and that has quietly been picking up in popularity over the long run. That language is Python, and, according to the TIOBE Programming Community Index Python was the language of the year for 2007.

Richard Stallman, industry activist and founder of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has - once again - relinquished his role as maintainer of the phenomenally successful GNU Extensible, Customizable, Display Editor (Emacs).

This assumes that you've read Martin Fowler's article on closures. Part 1 shows a translation of Martin Fowler's Ruby code into Python, both a direct translation and a more idomatic translation using Python's "list comprehensions"

Martin Fowler (obligitary Fowlbot namedrop) recently blogged about the power of closures in languages that support them. Here's a translation of Martin's Ruby code into Python.

Let's say you are designing a system and you have worked out what classes you are going to need; but you also realise that as time goes on you are going to have to release other "collaborator" objects for your system. You would like to release these new objects only, and not all the objects in the system, but how are you going to allow existing objects to handle these new "collaborator" objects, when you have no idea what these new objects will do at the time that you are designing the original objects? Yeah its a bummer isn't it?

10th birthday interview Bruce Perens doesn't regret the fact that, since officially co-birthing open source with The Cathedral and the Bazaar author and hacker Eric Raymond ten years ago, Linux and open source have moved from the sandal-wearing fringes to acceptance by Wall Street and big, closed-source industry giants.

When I first heard about git, I was suspicious that there could be anything special about it, but after watching Linus' talk about it, I was... even more suspicious. I tried it anyway. When I tried it, I realized something right away: what made git awesome was actually none of the things Linus had talked about, not really. Those things were more like... symptoms of the underlying awesomeness. Yes, git is fast. Yes, it is distributed. Yes, it is definitely not CVS. Those things are all great, but they miss the point.

A community driven project for Ruby source code to run natively on Microsoft's .NET framework has shut down, faced by progress from an official Microsoft effort.

I've come to the conclusion that the DLR is clearly here to stay - it's becoming an even more important part of the Microsoft platform. I also believe that to obtain production quality performance, Ruby.NET would need to reinvent (or adopt) something equivalent to the DLR. If we were starting the project today, there is no way we wouldn't use the DLR. Whilst Ruby.NET initially had a good head start on the IronRuby project; by incorporating the Ruby.NET parser and scanner and by leveraging the DLR, I now believe that IronRuby is more likely to succeed as a production quality implementation of Ruby on the .NET platform. I believe that ultimately there is no need for two different implementations of Ruby on .NET.

Project XANA is an experimental R&D OS implementing xanalogical functionalities. It is written primarily in D, with some C and Assembler. It provides an enfilade-based FS for both disk and ram, a ZigZag-like console UI, an executable format similar to ZigZag's cell programming, and other interesting features.

A couple of days ago I posted that, although some developers use the terms Inversion of Control and Dependency Injection as if they are the same thing, they are in fact not the same. I said that Dependency Injection was a "kind of" Inversion of Control, it wasn't the only kind and they are not the same thing. I then went on to give an explanation of the Dependency Injection pattern.

Okay, in this post we are going to look at Dependency Injection. First thing you have to know (and the reason for the title of this post) is that Inversion of Control is not Dependency Injection. You'll hear developers mix the two terms as if they are the same thing, they're not, Dependency Injection is a "kind of" IoC, but its not the only kind and they are not the same thing.

With speculation building that Microsoft will bring Windows 7 forward by a year, ostensibly to staunch the loss of the Vista weary and Vistaphobes to alternative operating systems, now is a good time to look at the state of development tools for Linux.

What you can - and cannot do - with your software is often determined by the code owner's license. From not using open source APIs with closed-source digital rights management (DRM) to being barred from fiddling with Windows source code, we've seen it all. Or have we?

One of the problems with “traditional” Ruby is the (notoriously) slow debugger. The Ruby In Steel Cylon debugger isn’t just the fastest Ruby debugger available it’s also the most functional, with several new features that I’ve just added.

The first alpha version of wxWidgets 2.0 was released 10 and a half years ago and we are still (only) at version 2.8.6 right now so the wxWidgets version numbers don't change very quickly as we, with the disdain proper to free software developers, don't really like inflating them for marketing purposes. However soon -- hopefully in the beginning of the next year -- we will release wxWidgets 3.0 which will be the first change of major version since a long time and only the second time it happens in wxWidgets history. So it may be interesting to look at what exactly has changed to warrant this and I'll try to briefly describe it in this post.

The first major update to HTML in 10 years - factoring in changing tastes around rich-media applications and online collaboration - has been unveiled by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The choice of Java as a first programming language in computer science courses is undermining good programming practice, according to two leading academics.