http://blog.snowtide.com building complex, innovative software and the business that goes with it Thu, 01 May 2008 12:10:31 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en While at dinner with a friend of mine a couple of weekends ago, we got to talking about how certain programming problems, usually the hardest ones we've faced, are ones where we ended up having to simply work the problem: stare at the code, stare at the reference / specification ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2008/05/01/burn-it-down We have one open position, and we are also accepting internship applications. Do you feel up to a challenge? http://blog.snowtide.com/2008/03/21/snowtide-is-hiring Last night, we had the privilege to host a talk by Rich Hickey on concurrency in Clojure at our offices in Northampton.  A good portion of the Western Mass. Developer's Group showed up for the event.  Many thanks to Lou Franco for coordinating things, and Shawn Fumo for arranging to ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2008/03/21/western-mass-developers-group-and-snowtide-host-rich-hickey-and-clojure In a thread on the Google Group dedicated to discussing languages hosted on the JVM (i.e. Scala, Groovy, JRuby, et al.), it was asked by a fellow named Jon Harrop whether something like F# (an OCaml / Standard ML derivative that targets the .NET CLR) would find any traction if ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2007/11/06/recommended-by-4-out-of-5-surveyed-seasoned-programmers Paul and Miles have been keeping notes at recent meetings of the Western Mass. Developer's Group lately so as to keep those who can't make it some weeks in the loop. However, neither of them could make it last night, so I thought I'd take a whack at providing ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2007/11/02/wmassdevs-meeting-notes-20071101 (...or, "Oh, Dear, Wasn't I Thinking Before?") As my friends will attest, I really enjoy programming languages. I'm one of those language fetishists that talk about "expressiveness" and "concision", and yes, I'm one of those very strange fellows who blurt out bad Lisp jokes while getting odd looks from innocent ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2007/10/31/scala-makes-me-think I'm way late in linking to this, but it's worth it. Last October, a presentation by Martin Fowler from JAOO 2006 popped up on InfoQ (which does a great job of simulating the actual experience of being at the session with its video/slideshow integration) where he gave a very high-level overview ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2007/04/16/thoughts-on-martin-fowlers-domain-specific-languages-overview Well, I sure did step in it. Consider: up until last week, I was simply using this space every now and then for some relatively bland navel-gazing related to selected goings-on at Snowtide. Then, a friend of mine decided to put my most recent post (probably the only potentially inflammatory ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2007/04/01/python-growth-and-sandboxes Inkling beat me to it, but after my recent revelations about Python, I've also decided to move all new development to Arc. Even better, it looks like someone has done an Arc implementation for .NET/Mono called SteelArc, which will suit our embedded apps nicely. I think the name ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2007/04/01/all-aboard-the-arc-bandwagon Paul Bissex just posted a simple three-step procedure for how one might become acquainted with the changes coming in Python 3 (née Python 3000). The mere mention of Python 3 prompted me to start writing a comment for Paul's post, but it went on long enough that I figured ... http://blog.snowtide.com/2007/03/28/python-growth-lack-thereof