Iron VMs

Will It Be JRuby vs. IronPython? "On the heels of Microsoft's release of IronPython 1.0 comes the news that Sun has hired the two primary JRuby developers.

I don't know if Sun intended it, but the juxtaposition of these two news item gives the effect that the two managed execution environments—The JVM and .NET—have each chosen an anointed champion scripting language for their platform.

The orphan that's left out of the spotlight is Jython. I feel kind of sad for Jython and its lone publicly known active maintainer Frank Wierzbicki."

JRuby Steps Into the Sun "The potential for Ruby on the JVM has not escaped notice at Sun, and so we'll be focusing on making JRuby as complete, performant, and solid as possible. We'll then proceed on to help build out broader tool support for Ruby, answering calls by many in the industry for a "better" or "smarter" Ruby development experience."

Attacking the Boundary of Ignorance

• The Ontology Integration Problem "The reason I think a mapping tool is a critical need is that I think while in theory it's a nice idea to imagine ontologists reusing ontologies from one another, in practice many ontologists (especially those working on large complex ontologies) would rather write their own internally consistent ontologies and map them to other ontologies rather than importing other ontologies into what they are making and then having to deal with all the inconsistencies and confusion that arises from doing that."


• Language Wars "I know Paul told you that he made his app in Lisp and then he made millions of dollars because he made his app in Lisp, but honestly only two people ever believed him and, a complete rewrite later, they won't make that mistake again.
  
  The safe answer, for the Big Enterprisy Thing where you have no interest in being on the cutting edge, is C#, Java, PHP, or Python..."


• Circles of knowledge and boundaries of ignorance "...earning can be viewed as either expanding your circle of knowledge or as increasing your boundary of ignorance. So, the more you learn the more you know, but also the more you know that you don’t know. Depending on your temperament, this can be either encouraging or discouraging to your efforts to continue learning."


• Bigtable: A Distributed Storage System for Structured Data From Google Research Papers


• JUnit 4 vs. TestNG A few advantages of TestNG such as dependencies and providing test data (even complex objects).

Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn

Mapping Rete algorithm to FOL and then to RDF/N3 "There is already a well established precedent with Python/N3/RDF reasoners (Euler, CWM, and Pychinko). FuXi used to rely on Pychinko, but I decided to write a Rete implementation for N3/RDF from scratch - trying to leverage the host language idioms (hashing, mappings, containers, etc..) as much as possible for areas where it could make a difference in rule evaluation and compilation.

What I have so far is more Rete-based than a pure Rete implementation, but the difference comes mostly from the impedance between the representation components in the original algorithm (which are very influenced by FOL and Knowledge Representation in general) and those in the semantic web technology stack."

The goes on to describe how the mapping from Semantic Web concepts to concepts used in the Rete algorithm (tokens, object type, alpha, beta, and terminal nodes). Some comments, RDF a hole to no where.

Things I've Read

* Evangelical Scientists Refute Gravity With New 'Intelligent Falling' Theory related to Boing Boing's $250,000 Intelligent Design challenge (UPDATED: $1 million) and Flying Spaghetti Monster.
* JUnit-Addons and GSBase so at least only two software projects have to reinvent the wheel.
* Non-blocking Data Sharing in Multiprocessor Real-Time Systems "In this paper, we present an efficient non-blocking solution to the general readers/writers inter-task communication problem our solution allows any arbitrary number of readers and writers to perform their respective operations."
* Why I Prefer SOA to REST "The problem is that although it is easy to model resources as services as shown in the example in many cases it is quite difficult to model a service as a resource. For example, a service that validates a credit card number can be modeled as a validateCreditCardNumber(string cardNumber) service. On the other hand it is unintuitive how one would model the service as a resource. For this reason I prefer to think about distributed applications in terms of services as opposed to resources." Now people can just argue about what is intuitive (credit card gateways on the Web existed before SOAP - must have been REST I guess).
* I Need a New Language: Rel? "I want a language for table programming. I think you can write programs in this language that do everything we expect of an application programming language -- building GUIs, reacting to mouse events, listening to sockets -- everything. Don't model your domain as objects. Model it as relations...I can imagine programs that have a relvar (Date's term for a relational variable: essentially a table or a view) for MouseState."
* Package Scoping And Unit Testing "Package scoping particularly shines during unit testing. Some programmers argue that you should only test through the public API. Don't be silly. Limiting your tests to the public API contradicts the spirit of unit testing and subjects you to unnecessary dependency pain. I prefer to isolate and limit the amount of code I test at one time, and test as close to the code as possible." Somewhat related, JSR 277 - Java Module System
* Web as Platform Mash-Ups "There have been a lot of excellent posts and articles this week about APIs, the Web as Platform, web sites as software companies, and so forth..."
* Ruby, Python, "Power" "There are different opinions on the relative power of Ruby and Python. I'm not much more authoritative than other resources (though I'm not less authoritative either; most comparisons between the two languages are flawed). Ultimately I don't believe there are many (any?) places where one language is more "powerful" than the other (and not just in the "they are both Turing complete" sense)"