Whatever your opinion the the Iraq war, whatever you think of Our Glorious Grinning Leader, it is still possible to point to at least one unqualified Good Law brought in by our current government.

Whenever I listen to old fashioned media business types, I find phrases like “Shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted”, “How are we going to keep ’em down on the farm now they’ve seen Paree?” and “Pissing against the wind” running through my head.

Several years ago, Mark Jason Dominus gave a lightning talk entitled ‘Design Patterns’ Aren’t. I didn’t see the talk, but I did come across his writeup not long after I first discovered the Gang of Four’s Design Patterns book. In that talk, Mark put his finger on an issue that had almost subliminally bothered me: many (possibly all) the patterns in that book weren’t really patterns. At least, not in the way Christopher Alexander - the architect who invented the form - described them. Alexander asserts that:

Okay, so I know GUI coding’s a pain in the bum. I know that the windows libraries aren’t the most friendly. I know it’s not fair to point and laugh.

In my semi regular trawl of the searches that bring people here, I was surprised to discover that someone had arrived searching for piers cawley nottingham university.

I’ve been busy with a new experimental branch of typo that plays well with edge rails, in part because I wanted to move to a more RESTful URL scheme for Typo.

There was a session at EuroOSCON on ‘Music 2.0’ and very good it was too. However, during the Q&A, I found myself ranting about how the model of music as product is dead. About the only specific thing I can remember of what I said was “I make music because I must. I record it because it helps me improve. And I distribute it because I can.”

This year’s EuroOSCON had no lightning talks scheduled. Then, late on Wednesday night, I noticed that a talk had been cancelled. Aha! I thought. I asked around a few people I knew who normally go for the lightning thing, got a critical mass of interested parties, went and found Nat and we were good to go.

In 2001, using an idea from James Duncan, who blames Damian Conway for getting him thinking on the right lines, I wrote a proof by implementation of the Extract Method refactoring for Perl. Though I say so myself, this was a Big Deal - Martin Fowler calls Extract Method the Refactoring Rubicon - once you have a tool to help you do that refactoring automatically, you can probably implement the rest of the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser and free yourself to think more about the interesting aspects of programming.

So, I heard myself telling a bunch of people at RailsConf Europe that the buzz about Ruby and Rails is the sound of “a bunch of Java programmers finally discovering how cool Perl is.”

Joel says Ruby is slow because it’s dynamic.

Avi explains that dynamic languages don’t have to be slow and points out at cunning trick pulled by the Strongtalk VM to avoid hitting (slow) vtables on every method call. A trick which Ruby fails to pull.

Has anyone seen my passport?

Update

Found it! I shall go to EuroOSCON 2006. See you all there, or at RailsConf Europe.

I’m guessing that, if you answer ‘yes’, you’ve been for a meal at The Fat Duck at Bray, El Bulli or some place that does the Molecular Gastronomy thing with similar élan.

When naming a variable, method, parameter or class, give it a name that fits well with the language and concerns of the scope in which you are using it.

Well, not fishing, but…

See you all in a fortnight.