Or so Slashdot reports, anyway. I certainly can't get to the OpenOffice site - totally slashdotted!

I'll try again tomorrow - it certainly looks worth a try. Anything other than Micro$oft, after all.

Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz's article is well worth a look.

One of the most frequent objections to scripting languages (such as Python) is that their lack of static types and declarations will make your code buggier. Until I tried Python, I would have thought the same thing myself. In practice, though, it just doesn't seem to be a problem.

At work, I use Java. Sure, some of the mistakes that I might make are picked up at compile time (or earlier, using a smart IDE like Eclipse). But only some of them. So I have to unit test thoroughly anyway. So all that the static type checking buys me is that I find some errors earlier than I otherwise would.

This would be good, except that static type checking makes me jump through a lot of hoops sometimes to get stuff done. I am certainly many times more productive with Python than with Java.

Now, I would never have discovered this unless I had given Python a try. Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt recommend that a professional developer should learn one new language a year, and preferably one based upon a new paradigm. I'll second that.

My next target is the functional language Haskell.

If only! My company aren't into Python, and there is no way I could afford to go off my own back. Ah well...

Joel's chat with Tom reveals that groups of developers can work in open plan offices. Bah!

I find that I have real problems staying in the zone these days. Phones ringing, other peoples conversations, you name it, it all distracts me.

See also Joel on XP.

Story at The Register.

Lots of macho hardware figures here, but what's new in terms of OS/400? (Or have they rebranded it as iOS yet?)