Archive for November, 2007

Clojure: A Lisp Worth Talking About

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

A couple nights ago I walked down to LispNYC in the East Village to hear Rich Hickey talk about Clojure, his new Lisp-like language. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting much. Another Lisp? Ho hum. I’m sure it’s very clever and cool and all, but not something I can actually use.
Instead, [...]

When You Have a Hammer, Everything Looks Like Rails

Monday, November 12th, 2007

AltLaw.org began life as a Ruby on Rails project. I was enamored of Rails at the time (who wasn’t?) and rapid-prototyping helped me get it up and running in just a few months.
The problem is that I’ve been trying to follow Rails’ conventions even when they aren’t exactly in line with what I need to [...]

Easterbrook on GPL, Presages AltLaw

Thursday, November 8th, 2007

While playing with my current all-consuming project, AltLaw.org, I came across this case: Wallace v. IBM. In 2006 a man named Daniel Wallace sued various distributors of GNU/Linux, including IBM, Red Hat, and Novell, for “price-fixing.” Since the GPL ensures Linux will always be free, Wallace argued, he cannot afford to enter the [...]