I was reading Kevin Bourrillion’s blog today. Kevin is a senior software engineer at Google, and is working with “Crazy” Bob Lee on Guice, Google’s internal dependency injection framework that they recently released into the wild. (I’m interested in Guice for my own reasons, which will become apparent soon. :)

Anyhow, Kevin has a post where he explains what “extraordinarily type-safe” is to his wife. In it, he provides the one of the best takes on type safety that I’ve ever read:

When things are not ‘typesafe’, someone can walk up to you and ask for your credit card and you can hand him a font, and he’ll say, ‘30 seconds.’ And he’ll walk away, many kilograms away and only later will he gleefully try to charge your credit card and explode cosmically. You know, like what was supposed to happen in Ghostbusters when they crossed the streams.

Freakin’ fantastic. :) Any time someone tries to sell me on the idea that weak-typing is better because it saves developer cycles, I’ll have to point them to that article.

Edit: After some thought, I was a little harsh on the title of the article. The play on his article’s headline was too much to resist. :) It obviously is not meant to be taken literally.

It’s very rare that I let something another blogger posts get under my skin, but Paul Graham’s article Microsoft is Dead made me bristle. A rant was necessary.

I’ve always thought of Paul as a smart guy, but his writings always drip of anti-Microsoft sentiment. Normally, that’s par for the course, and I let it slide — after all, if you don’t bash Microsoft at least three times a day you’re obviously a shill of the Man. Like I said, usually I let it slide, although I probably should expect slightly more from a respected blogger than I would of your average run-of-the-mill Slashdot troll. His latest article, though, is complete and total ivory tower bullshit.

Some of my favorite quotes from the article:

All the computer people use Macs or Linux now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s.

What in the hell are you talking about? To be sure, lots of geeks use Macs and (particularly) Linux. That doesn’t mean that no one uses Windows anymore. Whether you particularly like the platform or not, if you’re a professional developer and you don’t know Windows, you’re definitely limiting your horizons. If you want to be ignorant of more than three-quarters of the business applications market, be my guest — it just makes it easier for me to find work.

The last nail in the coffin came, of all places, from Apple. Thanks to OS X, Apple has come back from the dead in a way that is extremely rare in technology. Their victory is so complete that I’m now surprised when I come across a computer running Windows.

Translation: “I don’t get out much. In my tunnel vision, I ignore 90% of the computing market. Microsoft who?”

And that was the second cause of Microsoft’s death: everyone can see the desktop is over.

If I had a dollar for every time I heard this since WEB 2.0 was coined, I could pay Bill Gates and Steve Jobs to fight to the death with rubber chickens in a no-holds-barred cage match. (And just try to come up with a better way to spend money than that!) This argument has been going on since Web 0.1alpha1. Whenever I hear anyone talk about this, I just laugh and recall fondly the NC and how Larry Ellison claimed it would be the FUTURE OF COMPUTING in the late 90’s. We still have applications running on mainframes, for God’s sake. What makes you think desktops are going anywhere? I’ll tell you what, Paul, you get one of your Y! Combinator startups to write the Quake engine using only HTML and Javascript, and we’ll talk — and remember, it’s 10 years old now.

Paul, what happened to you since your Great Hackers article? Are you that desperate for linkbait? Maybe it’s just that you’ve spent way too much time inside the Y! Combinator Anti-Reality Bubble. Your subsequent Cliffs Notes post trying to ease some of the backlash just served to make you look even more ridiculous — because you still stand by your insane claims.

I’m known to root for the underdogs too, but that doesn’t mean that I delude myself into thinking that when I speak, worlds are created before my feet.