Category: Software and Programming

James A. Robertson tries to explain “the problem with Wikis”:http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/blog/blogView?showComments=true&entry=3228889836

bq. People like rich client software. People tend to not like basic editing tools – which is what Wikis use. Combine a Wiki with decent posting tools, and I bet you would see more collaboration.

I just had to do this entry with “MT-Textile”:http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php markup, obviously. :-)

Tim Bray: On the Goodness of Unicode

Also, a cool Unicode Converter, which appears to be written in Javascript. I think Javascript in current browsers is going to be a good solution for handling international character data (my personal problem is mixing Hebrew and European characters).

Paul Graham, The Hundred-Year Language

Somehow the idea of reusability got attached to object-oriented programming in the 1980s, and no amount of evidence to the contrary seems to be able to shake it free. But although some object-oriented software is reusable, what makes it reusable is its bottom-upness, not its object-orientedness. Consider libraries: they’re reusable because they’re language, whether they’re written in an object-oriented style or not.

I think that comment jibes with my experience; objects are useful for particular problem-domains, but divide-and-conquer, building up a set of tools (functions) that each handles a little bit of the problem and putting them together in a much simpler framework – this is useful anywhere.