The Tale of J. Random Newbie: "Why do programmers reinvent wheels? There are many reasons, reaching all the way from the narrowly technical to the psychology of programmers and the economics of the software production system. The damage from the endemic waste of programming time reaches all these levels as well." Ah, Eric Raymod affronta il problema del perché si inventano così tante ruote nel nostro ambiente. Difficile scriverlo in modo più organico ed elegante.

Joel on Software - Biculturalism: "By now, Windows and Unix are functionally more similar than different. They both support the same major programming metaphors, from command lines to GUIs to web servers; they are organized around virtually the same panoply of system resources, from nearly identical file systems to memory to sockets and processes and threads. There's not much about the core set of services provided by each operating system to limit the kinds of applications you can create." Una rassegna di differenze culturali sottili ma importanti fra il mondo Unix e il mondo Windows. L'articolo prende quota quando esamina l'approccio alla soluzione dei problemi.

How you can help us end the software patent nightmare Non avete ancora firmato contro i brevetti software? Meglio approfondire e informarsi per bene. Noi europei non abbiamo nulla da guadagnare dai brevetti software. Run, don't walk, to ffii.org and support their work. They recently stalled the EU Commission's attempt to reverse the written law for Europe (which says software "as such" cannot be patented) -- don't you know those lawyers have been using those two words "as such" to reverse the meaning entirely. At the behest of the pro-software patent establishment, the European Patent Office has been granting software patents in direct contravention of the law, based on the rationale that since software is "just another field of technology," like hardware (think FPGAs), it should be patentable.