Cyclopedia Square

I read the “tutorial”: and thought, “the syntax is Frankenstein ugly. They have Guido on staff, but this looks like they consulted Larry Wall. Why didn’t they just write an open source D compiler?” Then I read the FAQ . Some very interesting ideas, and personally, ever since using C++ for some large embedded programming projects (large? embedded? not as oxymoronic as you might think), I’ve been thinking these same things for a while now: No major systems language has emerged in over a decade, but over that time the computing landscape has changed tremendously. There are several trends: Computers are enormously quicker but software development is not faster. Dependency management is a big part of software development today but the “header files” of languages in the C tradition are antithetical to clean dependency analysis—and fast compilation. There is a growing rebellion against cumbersome type systems like those of Java and...

My employer just supplied me with a MacBook Pro running OS X Version 10.6.1 (is that a little redundant?). For a long time I have eyed macs with wary suspicion, but with a lot of curiosity too. If Microsoft is evil, as some like to say, because it locks customers in to its proprietary software, Apple must be at least twice as evil. They lock customers in to their software *and* hardware! I kind of like the new laptop, though. Mechanically, it's awesome. The aluminum body feels nice and solid. The lid doesn't latch when it closes, it just kind of (magnetically?) holds to the body. The buttons and USB slots and everything are also very nicely done. The display is one of those glossy ones for "brighter colors" and I hate the glare. The user interface has me all confused with buttons and menus in places I'm not used to. It has this fancy new mouse trackpad that is huge and it lest you do multi-finger stuff kind of like an iPhone (which I don't have). T...