Bid for Yahoo seen as evidence of “the first economic slowdown of the Web 2.0 era.” And watch out growth rate lovers: Google’s has slipped.

Clojure, another post-Java JVM language: “[redacted] is nice and Scala is sweet, but I’ve had an unfulfilled hankering for a good Lisp on the JVM for a very long time.” Hooray for some fresh blood! It will create more pressure to raise the JVM’s dynamic performance ceiling. That is, if there are enough people out there hankering for Lisp on the JVM. So, probably not, but still: cool.

We have a winner! “The blog software has been written from scratch. It uses CouchDB (via the CouchDB Python library) for storage, Genshi for templating …” That is, a winner of the race to use CouchDB in some weblog software. If you hadn’t heard about this race, that’s because all the contes­tants were known only to themselves. Coderspiel entered of course, planning to replace Hibernate in Typeturner, but we only got as far as downloading Couch and thinking real hard about the ideal way to integrate it with Scala. Maybe next time!

John Rose on the DLR: “They work completely above the level of the CLR without significantly enhancing it, while we are developing the JVM and libraries at the same time. I have been busy with the JVM, while Charles Nutter has been doing great work rebuilding JRuby downward toward the JVM… the Microsoft CLR JIT does not appear to be under active development; its optimi­zation level is as rudimentary as the earliest Java JITs.” { previously }

Coderspiel has been out sick, but that didn’t stop reddit from recycling the old nerd factor post to the tune of several hundred thousand pageviews. Crazy!

Wicket 1.3.1 released with “out-of-the-box, transparent clustering support.”

Lift 0.5 released with integration for Blueprint CSS, jQuery, and JSON.

Don’t do this: Scala Development with Eclipse and WebLogic JSPs

Map/Reduce plans for CouchDB

Speaking of opening up the world of programming to more people by teaching younger children, at least somebody is doing that: Teaching My Daughter To Code, Part IV: Return of the Daleks. What would happen if they did this in schools?

What’s the most recent programming book I’ve read? Um, let me see. It was a dark and stormy semester, in the late 20th century, and… Learn, But Not Necessarily Through Books

I really thought computers were deterministic!

Code Commit’s Scala series concludes with Getting Over Java: “some of the many ways in which Scala surpasses its lineage.” { previously }

Post on using Scala implicit for open classes uses a trait to scope-in conversion functions, which is kind of nicer than the import com.foo.Bar._ approach we cribbed from enriched JDBC. And it’s refreshing to think about using this tech not just to fix Java frameworks, but for wide open coding.

bytesized: “I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that the larger the codebase is, the more it approximates a poorly done dynamic type system.” Rings true, sadly.

This morning’s funnies: Groovy will replace the Java language as dominant language: “Two to three years from now the performance of dynamic languages like JRuby and Groovy will be equivalent to pure Java code.” Pffffftttttt! Hey smart guy want to bet us a million dollars, or better yet euros, on that?

Gruber is right about Flash on the iPhone. Why would Apple allow someone else’s platform to run wide open on their hardware when they won’t do the same for themselves? iPhone Flash predictions are nothing but wishful, uninspired thinking.

Scala 2.7 is expected in a week or two. Among the big changes in this version is support for Java generic types enabled by default. The Class class, for example, will be parametrized and so will be able to imply type parameters when an instance of it is passed to a function. This can result in a hilarious reduction of code, as a future post will try to demonstrate.

Something called ERP is driving companies into bankruptcy. Who could have predicted that outsourcing all your business grey matter in a single $5.5 mil. software project would be so risky?! The abbreviation’s E is for enterprise, as usual, but also as usual it proved to be code for expensive boondoggle.

Linguistic bungee cord for null pointers: “@Nullable, @NotNull annotations which allow you to formally specify method contracts and validate whether these contracts are met.” { previously, related }

If you make extensive use of Wicket ajax, as this weblog’s editing software does, you will run into back button trouble. Firefox can be fixed with some strongly worded cache headers, but even if you do everything Apple says to force a reload, you’ll still run into problems with Safari. Coderspiel labs found that Safari will grudgingly request the page again, yes, but there must be some garbage cached somewhere in the browser. The page will appear to render correctly, but opening a ModalWindow can produce stale data. Not good, especially if you don’t notice and overwrite recent changes! So, if you’re on an ajax-modified page that you may want to come back to, try to remember to ⌘-click on external links. :\

Blueprint 0.7 includes Ruby scripts: “It’s been way too long since our last release, so 0.7 is in many ways a pretty daunting upgrade. Lots of things have changed, making the framework more powerful, customizable and nimble than ever before.” Neat! This would be great in a Gem that you could load from Rake and Buildr.

Remember the 1990s, when Apple was always being all “beleaguered”? So does The Wall Street Journal! That is why, as a joke presumably, they delivered a line this morning about “Apple’s beleaguered shares” and later removed the B-word. This hilarious newsman’s homage to the Performa days could only be topped by saying that Apple’s beleaguered shares will take a bus plunge if the next iPhone update does not include a Flash player. Aiieeee. { previously }

Using standard list processing functions in Scala (tail head zip count) to find out who loves whom. Plus, pattern matching and how implicit conversions can fix yet another chatty Java library (JScience). Consume this post with bagel.

Did you know… that a Scala trait can extend Wicket’s Component and use methods of that class? Then you can with it to any class that extends Component? OMG!!!