I just read an introduction to Java Generics this morning. They are not any simpler than C++ generic and the addition of wildcards is going to keep the language lawyers in business for a long time. Man, the lengths people will go to maintain type safety for types that end up having no business relevance. We need rethink computer languages.

News on Wired about HD TiVo. 250GB = 30 hours.

The Pragmatic Programmers How To Keep Your Job slides have been mentioned before, but they are worth mentioning again. Great stuff. A worthwhile read for anyone in the tech trade.

Every once in a while I hear the "we did this code generation stuff in LISP 40 years ago". So I track back to the person and ask them to tell me about it. It hasn't worked out yet. I have no doubt that code generation was done then as it is done now. I read "we did the same thing 40 years ago" as "you had a great idea 40 years ago and you neglected to communicate it properly." Code generation is taught, if it is taught at all, as a graduate course.

I'd love to learn the technical lessons from the LISP macro code generation. But I have already learned the most important lesson from this experience, which is when you have a good idea you should feel obligated to pass it on for the good of the profession.

One thread that I have seen, mainly in the Java world, is code generation at runtime. Frankly, I don't get the need for that at all. It sounds like self-modifying code, which is hard to maintain, hard to debug, hard to understand, and often more about how cool the tech is than common sense.

Looks like the Pragmatic Programmer, Dave Thomas, is an OS X fan.

Is it just me or is there nobody at Mozilla who realizes that Firefox is also the name of the 1982 movie with Clint Eastwood?