Day: October 25, 2002

Doug Kaye:

Will Web Services Change Web Hosting?  The high-end web-hosting business is cooling off, but web services are on fire. What’s going to happen when they meet? I recently spoke to some of the movers and shakers of the web-hosting world, and asked them how they were anticipating the arrival of web services. [My October column for The Web Host Industry Review]

Keith Devens:

Up until just now I had been poo-pooing .Net – I’ve really taken absolutely no interest. C# is easy if you know Java, .Net the libraries are just a bunch of class libraries I can pick up, and while IL I’d be interested in, it’d take more time to really understand deeply than I was willing to give right now.

Then I got a call from a recruiter. I told him I wasn’t in the market right now, of course – anyone who’s been following my weblog realizes how much work I’ve had in school this past week, for instance – but that I’d be happy to be back at work. Compared to work, I hate school. So he asked my timetable for school, and I told him, and he said he’d keep in touch.

Before we got off the phone, he recommended that I learn C# and .Net. He didn’t really seem to know what they were, but he said that that’s what’s going to be big. Like I said, up until now I’ve been poo-pooing .Net, but today I’ve realized that maybe someone will be willing to pay me to do it. I’m more interested now… 🙂 So maybe I should keep my “skills” up to date with .Net…

C# is wicked cool, and seems natural from a Java programmer’s point of view.

Magnus Lie Hetland: Instant Python.

To begin with, think of Python as pseudo-code. It’s almost true. Variables don’t have types, so you don’t have to declare them. They appear when you assign to them, and disappear when you don’t use them anymore. Assignment is done by the = operator. Equality is tested by the == operator. You can assign several variables at once.

Dude.  I always knew that Python ruled, but I needed this bootstrap a lot.  Everything python that I’ve read makes complete sense, but this feels like a handy dandy reference for programmers who need to know the basics of py.

Blocks are indicated through indentation, and only through indentation.

I love this language.