From Wikipedia, The Funarg Problem Funarg is an abbreviation for "functional argument"; in computer science, the funarg problem relates to the difficulty of implementing functions as first-class objects in stack-based programming language implementations. I've been thinking about this in the context of the Professionalization of Scripting Languages, does anyone know if any of the processor manufacturers are working on adding silicon support for activation records? Well, if they think this problem is peculiar to stack-based programming-language implementations, they should consider the difficulty of non-stack-based programming-language implementations.

If you haven't visited my site recently, I've redesigned, or undesigned as the case may be, stripping out as much as I could, dropping background images, etc, following in the minimalism of Mark and Ryan, though I doubt I'll ever get around to setting a Baseline. And removing administrative debris is easy since I don't have any, controlling my blog is all done via the Atom Publishing Protocol. Now that I've cleared the underbrush I'll start in on Sam's version of minimalism.

More has been written about the price of oil and the cost of transportation in the past year than in the previous 30. Before that we had the oil crisis of the 70s and since then our inability to make any progress on fuel efficieny has been strangled by the car companies and their complicit allies of all political stripes. Now the refrain we've heard from the car companies has been consistent and can be boiled down to the now familiar "

Tim points to a survey of bug tracking and source code management tool preferences. The surprise to me is that the three distributed version control system have garnered more than 60% of the votes. Would that have been even conceivable a year or two ago? It is illuminating to notice that the top 60% of bug tracking systems are shared between three of the worst such systems on the planet.

Protocol Buffers have been open sourced. They're one of the first things you learn about when you start at Google and they're used everywhere. The release supports C++, Java and Python, but Brad is working on Perl support. What's the reason for lack of PEP8 compliance for the Python support? Posted by JB on 2008-07-09 Google has their own coding style guide for Python which doesn't always line up with PEP8.

Wow, suddenly gedit went from the notepad of Gnome to something much more. It's no Acme, but I wonder if you could get some of the same effects by writing a plugin like Tool Launcher that also exported a FUSE filesystem. What amuses me is that he got excited over what is effectively a one-liner in vim (by shelling out to date) and probably about as easy in Emacs, I’m not sure why anyone would get so thrilled over being able to extend their editor when such a simple desire requires that much ceremony to fulfil…

I love all the stories about the search for water and possibly life on Mars and the new discoveries of more earth-like extrasolar planets, but I just think there's a bit of a perspective problem when it comes to presuming that being closer to earth-like is better when it comes to the search for life. Yes, the only known sample point we have of life is that existing on our own planet (for now), but that doesn't mean that our planet is optimal for the formation or survival of life.

I missed this book when it was first published, but picked it up recently and was really impressed. While the title would have you believe it was focused on the internet, in actuality only the last chapter discusses the parallels between the telegraph and the internet, while the remainder of the book is actually a well written history of the telegraph, which bodes well for the endurance of this book; instead of coloring the whole book with the perspective of the internet as it exists today, it is left as a straight-forward history that will probably take on fresh meanings and perspectives as the internet grows and our relationship to it evolves.

The latest draft of the multipart/related extension for atompub is now available. And in case you missed it on the mailing list, this spec will be proceeding on the standards track.

Clueless corporate member of mainstream media fails to grasp internet; cuts nose off to spite face; film at eleven. The Associated Press: The Associated Press is the bastion of the people's right to know around the world. With a long history of involvement in FOI issues and actions, AP is an industry leader in "open government issues." Unless, of course, you're one of those dirty hippie bloggers. The scope of AP's efforts worldwide is extraordinary.

My new favorite blog is The Big Picture. My last 'new favorite blog' was back in February, but I'm not sure what the customary time between 'new favorites' is.

I've been seeing URI Template implementations but not working at keeping a formal list of them, then it dawned on me that I don't really need to do that work myself. I've created a wiki page to track such implementations, please feel free to add to the list.

Yesterday we announced draft-gregorio-atompub-multipart-00. By "we" I mean Google, and by "announced" I mean that the internet-draft got published last month and I finally got around to writing a blog post this week. As usual the discussion should take place on the atom-protocol mailing list. One thing I didn't mention in the announcement is that the source for the draft is hosted on Google Code Project Hosting. Not only does that give me Subversion, and the ability to host files ( like the HTML version of the spec), but also the Issue Tracker which I will use to track open issues with the spec.

Well, that was a little longer blogging hiatus than I had planned, due to a combination of being busy at work and working on a piece of software that I hope to announce in the near future.

So by now everyone should have seen the SquirrelFish announcement. And MagLev. And you've see Steve Yegge's presentation, "Dynamic Languages Strike Back". And you've been following the discussion about the relative merits of stack versus register based VMs. As an aside, note that the Java VM is stack based and the Dalvik VM on Android is register based. All of those things on their own are interesting, but what's more important is that we're talking about them all at the same time.

Christopher, my 13 year old, has been playing with Flash for quite a while and has produced his first game: Gravity Mouse. It's a really neat concept and has already gotten 28 reviews and received a score of 2.89/5.0 on Newgrounds. I'm really proud of him. Of course, this is what he was doing when he should have been working on his C++ homework, but I think I'll cut him some slack in this case.

I'm not following HTML5, so this was pleasantly surprising news: The last few weeks there has substantive discussion on the HTML WG mailing list (public-html) and the Math WG public dicussion mailing list (www-math) regarding embedding non-HTML languages in the text/html serialization of HTML focusing mostly on MathML and SVG. It will be nice when the majority of the web has access to both SVG and MathML. Only a few years too late for me .

Brian Redfern Just look at the Css Zen Garden website to see a great demo of the power of xhtml at work. Excuse me? CSS Zen Garden was about - you know - CSS. It's now 404. Posted by James on 2008-04-07 re 404: probably because he's now aware that the CSS Zen Garden isn't XHTML (might it look like XHTML, it's served as text/html, so...) Posted by Thomas Broyer on 2008-04-07 I suppose the only thing better than a 404, in this case, would be a YSoD.

The latest draft of the URI Template spec is available: http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-gregorio-uritemplate-03.txt As usual you can find the HTML, diffs from the previous version, and an updated URI Template explainer web service here: http://bitworking.org/projects/URI-Templates/ I folded in much of the feedback on the 02 draft. Here are the notes from the revision history: Added more examples. Introduced error conditions and defined their handling. Changed listjoin to list. Changed -append to -suffix, and allowed -prefix and -suffix to accept list variables.

Cliff Click, chief JVM architect at Azul Systems as quoted in InfoWorld: As your program grows in size, the lack of strong typing basically kills your ability to handle a very large program and so you don't find the million-line Perl program That line in particular has elicited some reactions, including this from chromatic: Second, the reason that there aren’t many million-line Perl programs is that the people who are capable of writing and managing million-line Perl programs have better ways to organize their projects than glomming a million lines of Java into a single shared-everything instance.