• I couldn’t stay for the all of Damian Conway’s presentation, Fun with Dead Languages, but I did catch the first hour, and it was both enlightening a hilarious. With detours into Latin, fish pricing, Toronto’s standing compared to other North American cities and that strange subculture of men who dress up as Lara Croft, he covered his evolution as a programmer by way of coding in “dead” languages such as Lisp, PostScript and C++. Well, they’re dead to him, anyway.
  • I must admit that while I’ve heard of the video blog Rocketboom, I’ve never watched a single one of their videos. As a result, I have only a vague idea of what the hell all the hoo-hah about Amanda Congdon’s departure is all about. Judging by the stories piling up in my aggregator, it’s a topic of interest to a lot of folks, and since I’m paid in part to be in the know about this sort of thing, I guess I’d better go give it a look-see.
  • Marc Weisblott’s Toronto-focused blog Paved has ceased operations, but not before featuring Yours Truly in a parody of Weekly Scoop magazine, along with other notorious Accordion City bloggers Antonia Zerbisias, Maria Davo and Warren Kinsella.
  • If you’ve been drinking Steam Whistle beer and haven’t returned your bottles, do so now! There’s a bottle shortage!
  • It’s been a while since I posted the entry titled The Girls from Ipanema are Not Impressed, but someone stumbled into it very recently and posted a lengthy and interesting comment — go check it out. I repeat my battle-cry from the article: “More Astrid Gilberto! Less Cathy!”
Joey deVilla

View Comments

  • Joey, the hoo-hah over Amanda is due to the fact that she is HAWT. Fortunately, I know also that she is quite nice.

  • Being a bit of a dead-programming-language enthusiast, I was jealous when I first hear about this, but if Lisp, C++, and PostScript are as dead a languages as he got into, I dunno. It still sounds like a fun presentation. You guys got the happening scene up there. But a presentation called "Fun With Dead Languages" having no mention of say, Forth or Prolog or even Pascal, let alone Jorf or Ceemac? I dunno.

  • Damian Conway in my opinion used the humor and "shock factor" by being provocative (c'mon the languages are not dead, maybe except his own: SPECS) to demonstrate how confusing syntax could make you wish the language was dead. What he was trying to showed was how he's smart and crazy and how Perl 6 is gonna be soooooooooooo awesome (according to him of course).

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