Right, that's it, I'm off for an extended bank holiday weekend. I'll be back on Tuesday.
Unfortunately, this means I'll be missing National Slackers Day, to which I feel I could have contributed very positively. But there you are.
Much of the time I'll be at the Blues at the Mills festival, either watching or helping out. I'll be by the bandstand on Saturday afternoon, and all over the place on Sunday and Monday.
Have a good weekend, all...
Well, we always used to say that a pint at lunchtime counted double, didn't we, Steve? Seems we were right.
First you kill Chemical Ali, then you capture him! Good job!
Tulna's engagement party. It's going to be the wedding of the century!
Oh yes, and congratulations to my brother Daniel on his engagement to Abbey. Obviously she sees you as a project, mate - a bit of a fixer-upper.
Sobig is biggest virus of all. Nasty.
I've not had any of these at all. This is odd, 'cos the anti-virus software we use quarantines email viruses, but the emails themselves do get through. I suppose that out security guys must have done something clever with the firewall or something, to strip this virus out before it even hits our email server.
Following up yesterday's What's better about Ruby than Python?, Hans Nowak identifies some more Ruby jewels.
Jeffrey Shell's Ruby/Python comparison posting to c.l.py is also worth a look - Jeffrey obviously knows Ruby pretty well, and he identifies both strengths and weaknesses as compared to Python.
Again, there are ideas here that Python might benefit from stealing, but nothing to tempt me away from Python. All this name, $name, @name, and @@name business appals me.
Oliver Steele's excellent post, Test versus Type, explores at some length the argument that test driven development makes static typing unnecessary at best, positively injurious at worst.
I leave with you with a quotation from Quinn Dunkan:
"The static people talk about rigorously enforced interfaces, correctness proofs, contracts, etc. The dynamic people talk about rigorously enforced testing and say that types only catch a small portion of possible errors. The static people retort that they don't trust tests to cover everything or not have bugs and why write tests for stuff the compiler should test for you, so you shouldn't rely on only tests, and besides static types don't catch a small portion, but a large portion of errors. The dynamic people say no program or test is perfect and static typing is not worth the cost in language complexity and design difficulty for the gain in eliminating a few tests that would have been easy to write anyway, since static types catch a small portion of errors, not a large portion. The static people say static types don't add that much language complexity, and it's not design "difficulty" but an essential part of the process, and they catch a large portion, not a small portion. The dynamic people say they add enormous complexity, and they catch a small portion, and point out that the static people have bad breath. The static people assert that the dynamic people must be too stupid to cope with a real language and rigorous requirements, and are ugly besides.
This is when both sides start throwing rocks."
Via Ted Leung.