Microsoft Shoots Self in Foot in Iceland

Since Holden Web has a modest interest in the Icelandic economy it's nice to see a major competitor's decision to unleash their draconian rapacious capitalist instincts has met with a swift kick in the gonads by way of a prompt reply.

Making design decisions about Icelandic markets in Redmond is like making design decisions about Europe in Detroit, say. Now major resellers in Iceland are realizing that the local market trusts them far more than Microsoft to say what's best for the Icelandic markets. And why wouldn't it? Unsurprisingly the vendors now prefer open source, so more revenue stays in Iceland.

Hey, Icelandic guys, welcome to the open source community. What's more you an train a generation of open source programmers who understand Icelandic. This could even help the long-term survival of the Icelandic language itself.

Misunderstandings

Here's a quote from an article about agile programming which is otherwise quite well-informed:

But because of their simplicity, languages such as Python and Ruby are better-suited to writing small applications.

This is the kind of myth that really needs to be squashed at the source. Unfortunately the source in this case is a journalist who has written an article and moved on with her misunderstanding of the issues and the facts completely untouched.

It's difficult to know how to attack this problem, because even the Python Software Foundation's advocacy coordinator were to contact the journalist in question and correct the mis-impression the damage is already done, and another opportunity to gain the wrong idea about dynamic languages is out there to be used as "evidence" by those looking to press the advantage of some other technique. It must have annoyed David Goodger (one of the Foundation's directors) to be quoted shortly after that misstatement.

In this particular case the author of the article did manage to get a lot right - technologies should come second to business needs, agile methods can save money by delivering business value faster and avoiding large amount of rework, and so on. So the content wasn't all bad, but the misunderstanding of Python's suitability for large projects spoiled it for me.

But then, I (and, I presume, most of thios blog's readers) already know that Python can be used successfully to build very large systems indeed.

Python Acknowledged at IEEE

The May/June edition of the prestigious Computing in Science and Engineering (CiSE) magazine is a single-subject issue on the topic of Python. This is surely a recognition of the language's value to scientists, and a vindication of the work put in by scientists all over the world to apply Python to scientific tasks.

CiSE is a joint publication of the IEEE Computer Society and the American Institute of Physics. Unfortunately not all articles are available electronically to non-members.

Just Another Dynamic Language Weenie?

I was mildly amused by a recent post on the Hacknot site. The author is clearly completely in love with himself (if this piece was written by a woman I'll buy a hat and eat it), and cannot even be bothered to get Stephan Diebel's name right. I really don't see the point of trying to put dynamic languages down - they exist, and those who don't want to use them don't have to. This is yet another boring case of some idiot fighting a religious war of their own imagining, and unfortunately it doesn't seem to contain much that usefully adds to the static vs. dynamic language debate.

About the most egregious example of false logic to be found is in the attempt to put down people who say "where's the harm - [dynamic languages] are just another item in your tool box, for use where appropriate". The author attempts to persuade us this argument is untenable because, he says, "... the same milksop argument is used by advocates of intelligent design ...". Because an argument is used irrationally by one misguided group of people doesn't make it any less valid in cases where it actually applies, however.

Overall I think the author is just looking for a group to refer to as weenies in a feeble attempt to prove (possibly to himself) that "I'm OK because you're not OK". The blog is output-only, with no apparent mechanism for reader feedback. Probably the author isn't interested in other people's opinions.