John Lam reports that Steve Yegge has ported Ruby on Rails to Javascript. Yegge himself seems a little nonplussed by all the fuss, while Joe Gregorio thinks it signifies little. I disagree: I’ve said for two years that Javascript has a real shot at being the hottest language of 2010, and efforts like this (however misguidedly heroic) are pointers on that road.
Andy Oram sent me email this morning to say that Beautiful Code has now been printed, and that copies are on their way to contributors. Coincidentally, David Crow dropped by this afternoon to chat, and mentioned that he’d seen a copy at FooCamp on the weekend. I look forward to hearing what you all think of it…
A few other sightings:
Again via Adam Goucher, a post by Cem Kaner summarizing the American Law Institute’s proposed Principles of the Law of Software Contracts. As Kaner points out, these will have a major impact on the software industry in areas ranging from bug disclosure to reverse engineering. The ALI report costs $25, and is written in dense legalese, so I look forward to more summaries 
The first Toronto Girl Geek Dinner (modeled after ones in London) is being held on Wednesday, June 27, at Alice Fazooli’s. Sandy Kemsley, a systems architect with 20-odd years of experience, is the featured speaker. I look forward to reports…
Jorge Aranda summarizes Ed Yourdon’s description of some back-and-forth with Barry Boehm about software “engineering” and the emphasis on nailing down requirements early during a panel session at ICSE’07. I think this kind of distributed conversation is wonderful.
Interesting if true. See also the graph in this post by Peter Brantley — very nice way to view network traffic.
Good post from Tara Hunt (ex-Saskatchewan, ex-Toronto, now doing the Web 2.0 startup thang) about how all the warnings and discussion about the crap women have to deal with online contributes to the climate of fear. Interesting and well-reasoned; comments are worth a read too. (Via Adam Goucher, again.)
This article from US News and World Report says that men can get into many American colleges with lower grades than are required for women:
The reason for these lower admissions rates for female students is simple, if bitterly ironic: From the early grades on up, girls tend to be better students. By the time college admissions come into the picture, many watchers of the “boy gap” agree, it’s too late for the lads to catch up on their own.
*sigh*
Titus Brown has posted about the first run of his Advanced Software Carpentry course at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. It was a bit bumpy, but seems to have gone well overall, and he has put a ton of useful material on the web.
Titus Brown would like to know if there are any faculty programming contests out there — he figures the competition would be less intense than in the student category . Personally, I’d rather see a hundred-meter proposal writing event, or possibly tag-team marking…
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