Catching up...

I'm sure that it's the same for you: you go away on vacation, have a great time, come back and your email inbox is stressing out your disk free space (or Google are writing you that you're getting close to exceeding their limit). And if you read a whole bunch of blogs, ditto or even double ditto. So yesterday I finally caught up with a whole bunch of posts that had happened while I was over in England visiting family and friends. Here's a link dump of some interesting ones.

• Joel Spolsky seems to be getting more and more reactionary in some ways and more hidebound in others. For some reason, he noticed I was away and then published a whole bunch of frankly bizarre posts to greet me on my return:
• A pretty good series on filling your job vacancies, although I wonder if one reason I enjoyed this series if that it pandered to some inner need I have to feel like a rock star.
• A good post with a nutty ending where he revealed that FogBugz had been written in an internal language they'd developed called Wasabi. Reading between the lines, it seems to compile to VBScript on Windows platforms or PHP on Unix ones. This is interesting in that other companies are doing similar things, but I don't know whether it's feasible for everyone, or just a cool way to approach something that has been solved by other (less cool?) means before.
• An even more surreal post where he justified creating Wasabi (because Fog Creek didn't want to be involved in the tech support issues of installing other things in order to make FogBugz run?).
• To crown it all, a post against Ruby where he seems to reveal a propensity for argument from ignorance.
• The best counter-argument to Spolsky was made by Jeff Atwood on Coding Horror; although John Lam on Less is Better had some good remarks. It is extremely interesting that Microsoft has released IronPython for the .NET Framework and Sun bought out the JRuby guys, both within the past couple of weeks or so: evidence that dynamic typing languages are becoming more and more mainstream.
• Avi Bryant merely proves Joel wrong, and talks about a way of method dispatching I hadn't heard of before.

But enough about Joel Spolsky. Moving right along...

• Eric Sink wrote a good article (as usual) on code coverage (OK, that was after I came back, but I didn't get to read it until yesterday anyway).
• Joe Duffy, CLR PM at Microsoft, has rapidly become one of my must-reads on multithreading and on the CLR in general. It seems that he's been working on a prototype of parallelizing LINQ queries and has had remarkable success in doing so, to the point of Anders becoming interested in and promoting the technology. Duffy calls his project PLinq. No news on how soon we'll be able to play with it though.
• Another of Duffy's posts from just before I went away: Why Sleep(1) is better than Sleep(0). This post typifies exactly why I've subscribed and read him assiduously.
• On a week when -- yet again -- someone I used to work with started spouting nonsense about how .NET's garbage collector works ("it uses a reference count in each object, right?"), I find Maoni's WebLog provides invaluable information. Her latest is about what's significant when you try and analyze -- let alone solve -- memory issues in your .NET app.
• Rico Mariani had a performance quiz on value-based programming. It and the subsequent post were very illuminating.
• Oh, and our very own Mark Miller decided to end his professional career. We're keeping him in isolation with minimal contact with anyone except trained psychiatric professionals. His newsgroup posts are being written my a ghost writer until further notice.

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