PL History and CS Classics

E7L3 (no permalink, alas) links to some course notes about the Evolution of Programming Languages and maintains a list of Computer Science Classics. (via Keith Devens)

Star Trek Nemesis

Ain’t It Cool News really doesn’t like the new Star Trek movie. I haven’t seen it yet, so I don’t know how accurate the review is, but it seems very plausible based on what Berman and crew have done with the once-great series. It’s like they’re in some kind of franchise-destroying competition with George Lucas.

The Poetry of Programming

Sun has an interview with Richard Gabriel, who says that software creation is not purely an engineering discipline.

What do people do when they’re being trained, for example, to get a Master of Fine Arts in poetry? They study great works of poetry. Do we do that in our software engineering disciplines? No. You don’t look at the source code for great pieces of software. Or look at the architecture of great pieces of software. You don’t look at their design. You don’t study the lives of great software designers. So, you don’t study the literature of the thing you’re trying to build.

I think we should.

Posting Anonymously

Kuro5hin has a discussion about how to remain anonymous on the Internet without relying on proxies like anon.penet.fi that for legal reasons are (probably) no longer effective.

State Boundaries

Chris Turner points to an animation showing the boundaries of the U.S. and the individual states changing from colonization to the modern age.

BBEdit/OmniOutliner Tip

Due to the way BBEdit handles Unicode and the way Cocoa handles different flavors of the clipboard, pasting from OmniOutliner into BBEdit can cause BBEdit to switch its script system and change the font away from my preferred ProFont. The solution is to change the characters in OmniOutliner’s RTF Export preferences to the same ones that are in its Text Export preferences. Then it won’t put any Unicode on the clipboard and everyone will be happy. (Thanks to Jim Correia.)