A blast from the past (courtesy of a link from a student - thanks Martin!) - Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal:

"The easiest way to tell a Real Programmer from the crowd is by the programming language he (or she) uses. Real Programmers use Fortran. Quiche Eaters use Pascal. Nicklaus Wirth, the designer of Pascal, gave a talk once at which he was asked, "How do you pronounce your name?". He replied, "You can either call me by name, pronouncing it 'Veert', or call me by value, 'Worth'." One can tell immediately by this comment that Nicklaus Wirth is a Quiche Eater. The only parameter passing mechanism endorsed by Real Programmers is call-by-value-return, as implemented in the IBM/370 Fortran G and H compilers. Real Programmers don't need all these abstract concepts to get their jobs done-- they are perfectly happy with a keypunch, a Fortran IV compiler, and a beer."

Today is the 98th anniversary of Orville Wright's first recorded flight in a heavier-than-air powered aircraft. He managed to stay aloft for 12 seconds, at a height of between 8 and 12 feet.

In his Joel on Software - Back to Basics piece, Joel concludes with:

"...my view of teaching is that first year CS students need to start at the basics, using C - and building their way up from the CPU. I am actually physically disgusted that so many computer science programs think that Java is a good introductory language, because it's "easy" and you don't get confused with all that boring string/malloc stuff but you can learn cool OOP stuff which will make your big programs ever so modular. This is a pedagogical disaster waiting to happen. Generations of graduates are descending on us and creating Shlemiel The Painter algorithms right and left and they don't even realize it, since they fundamentally have no idea that strings are, at a very deep level, difficult, even if you can't quite see that in your perl script. If you want to teach somebody something well, you have to start at the very lowest level. It's like Karate Kid. Wax On, Wax Off. Wax On, Wax Off. Do that for three weeks. Then Knocking The Other Kid's Head off is easy."

Dave McCusker agrees in his response to Joel's article:

"Many junior coders today are simply awful, from ignorance. Learning exclusively from high level language is bad for you. I'm afraid you also need a really good hazing in bits and bytes.

I say hazing like it's both unnecessary and a joke, but it's not. Low level basics are hard to learn without serious sweating. If it doesn't feel like hazing, you don't learn enough lessons. Today's slow and bloated software is often due to two reasons. These are bad usage of strings, and bad memory management."

As someone who teaches both low-level programming and computer architecture and who has a great respect for Joel and Dave's opinions, I agree wholeheartedly. To be sure there will be some quiche-eaters that won't ;-)

BBC | Dimbleby Lecture by Bill Clinton - The Struggle For The Soul of The 21st Century

Former US President, Bill Clinton, presented the lecture in London on 14 December 2001.

The lecture was broadcast on BBC1 on Sunday 16 December 2001.

His speech considers what is happening in the war against terrorism, and calls for a long-term strategy to address underlying problems in the countries involved. Having read widely on Islam and the Middle East in the past year, Clinton delivers a message calling for tolerance and issues a challenge to the Muslim world to acknowledge its responsibility for encouraging open debate and democracy.

I caught the last half of this lecture. I was enthralled. Despite a very hoarse delivery, the studio audience, and I dare say the viewing audience, were also spellbound. It was a great speech. Full of compassion. The full text of the speech is online. The final paragraph of which is:

"It's great that your kids will live to be ninety years old but I don't want it to be behind barbed wire. It's great that we're gonna have all these benefits of the modern world, but I don't want you to feel like you're emotional prisoners. And I don't want you to look at people who look different from you and see a potential enemy instead of a fellow traveller. We can make the world of our dreams for our children, but since it's a world without walls, it will have to be a home for all our children."

Update: There's a discussion going on at Jim's place (mainly) about Clinton rather than the speech. Sigh! Seems to me that people would rather rake over old coals rather than push forward on things that really matter. As a parent of two children, I dearly want a better legacy for them.

Here an intereresting thread over at Wes' place - Hack the Planet Prime: New Mac for Linux Geek?

O'Reilly Network: Apache Web-Serving with Mac OS X: Part 2 [Dec. 14, 2001]

So, after the work we did in the last article, we've got a prettier URL, but still a rather boring site. We need features to impress the boss, and to turn them on we're going to have to start fiddling with Mac OS X's Terminal. We're going to assume you know how to edit and save files via the command line, either through a native shell editor (like vi or emacs) or via a GUI editor such as BBEdit. Our examples below assume BBEdit 6.5 and its shell utility.

O'Reilly Network: Learning the Mac OS X Terminal: Part 1 [Dec. 14, 2001]