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Superb name!

Via b3ta.

Software development is just too complex these days for anyone to really know what they are doing in more than one 'programming world', according to Joel.

I think that he's probably right. I'm painfully climbing the foothills of the Java/J2EE world at the moment.

The iSeries world, my bread and butter for many a year, is probably static enough these days that I don't need to get left behind. This is good - it took a long time before I knew how to make the '400 fly in the first place.

A number of people at work are getting into the .NET world at the moment, in their own time. This seems a little odd to me - there is no realistic prospect of anyone making use of this stuff in my company in the near future. Still, I can see the attraction - .NET might not kill J2EE, but MS won't let .NET die under any circumstances.

Not that I'm tempted, you understand - MS are the Great Satan, so far as I am concerned. No, I'll stick with Java/J2EE.

Some tools are just so good that they help you whatever world you are in.

Don't Use System.out.println! was Tuesday's hot story at Java.blogs, believe it or not.

Using System.out.println is worse than I thought, though - David Johnson points out that it can really slow your system down. Yuck!

One other thing to consider - if there is any possibility, any possibility at all, that you might want to run something as a Windows service, then you can't use stdin, stdout, or stderr at all. (BTW, if you do need to run Java as a service, check out jsrvany.)

Speculation about the possibility of IBM buying Rational software have been slopping around the blogsphere recently.

Now, according to Reuters, it seems that it's possible that Microsoft might be trying to outbid them.

What's more, the Borg might be looking to snap up Borland, too.

Now, I've never used anything by Rational, so I have no strong opinion about who owns them.

The Borland thing is a different kettle-of-fish, though. I can't see how it would be anything but a bad thing if Microsoft were to take over one of its few real rivals in the development tools market. One of the few real innovators, to boot.