I finally released Adder, the language I've been working on off and on for the past two years.

Adder is Python with a Lisp; Adder : Python :: Clojure : Java. It integrates smoothly with Python-Adder code can call Python code, and import Python modules, and vice versa.

I wanted to try out Scala (mostly to have a real programming language on Android), but I've run into a snag: the compiler is much too slow. I was OK with Scala 2.7.x on my desktop at work (4-core 3GHz Woodcrest-a Xeon version of Core 2), but 2.8.x on my laptop (2-core 1.6GHz Core Duo) was insanely slow--105 seconds to compile a 6-line program. ( ( Read more... )

A disturbing article on how programmers' incomes plateau after age 40, and shrink after age 50. Myself, I've worked with only one programmer who seemed to be over 60, and only a few who seemed to be over 50.

In a talk here at ILC 2009, it was just mentioned that, on the CLR, throwing an exception took 3000 times as long as returning a value. I wondered what the gap would be like in Python 3.0, so I ran a quick test on my handheld, and the answer was: a factor of 5. I need to dig sometime to find out what the absolute gap is (i.e., the difference ( Read more... )