Geek Snark and More

I came across an excellent blog last night, Jens Alfke's Thought Palace. Here are a couple of excerpts that made me laugh out loud (emph. added):

Just when it seemed, a decade ago, that the programming world had settled on C++ as the lingua franca, the One Language To Rule Them All, instead we got an explosion of new high-level languages that have risen to popularity. Why did this happen? Chiefly because the World-Wide Web has conditioned users to expect five-second delays before any responses to their actions, which provides an environment ideally suited for interpreted, garbage-collected scripting languages.

(The whole thing)

And:

Me, I defected long ago. I’m another of those Apple Java engineers who dropped out. I spent five years as a raving Java fanboy, but I gave up after optimizing AWT, implementing drag and drop, and trying to make 1,200 pages of crappy APIs do the right thing on the Mac. Then I took a one-week Cocoa training course, and wrote the first prototype of iChat.

Desktop Java never worked because Sun tried to build their own OS on top of the real OS, duplicating every API and feature. This led to terrible bloat, making every app as heavyweight to launch as Photoshop. Worse, the GUI portions of the Java platform are awful, because Sun is a server company with no core competency at GUIs. The APIs are too clumsy to code to, and compared to any decent Mac app, the results look like a Soviet tractor built on a Monday.

(The whole thing)

A lot of Jens's site is programming-specific. One post of particular note that is not: Ozone. This is a fine piece of hallucination. Jens also provides optional background music on this page -- I recommend it.

Thanks to Jeff Atwood for the initial link.