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Yo, I heard you like to put text editors in your friends' text editors, when you hear that they like text editors, so they can edit text while they're editing text. Here's a text editor you can put in the text editor you put in your friends' text editors, so you can put text editors in text editors while putting text editors in your friends' text editors which they can use to edit text while they edit text.

Twitter made a big mistake by basing their technology around Ruby on Rails.

Ruby on Rails is, of course, great for CRUD-style websites. It makes development lighting fast, and easy as sin. Twitter doesn't exactly fall into that category. Although Ruby on Rails is flexible enough to develop a small-scale version of the Twitter application, it just isn't capable of scaling.

They really need to be looking into Erlang. Erlang is perfect for the type of software they need to provide the service they offer (see ejabberd for example). Plus it's open source, and it has a vibrant online community, and frequent releases, numerous conferences, interfacing with other languages, and other goodies.

Erlang originated from, and has been successfully used within, the telecom industry, which is very similar to the market Twitter is involved with. Thus they should learn from the masters, and use Erlang wherever possible for their core services.

Oddly enough, I just watched a presentation about this very topic, with an emphasis on Erlang's model for concurrency. The slides are available here:

http://www.algorithm.com.au/downloads/talks/Concurrency-and-Erlang-LCA2007-andrep.pdf

The presentation itself (OGG Theora video available here) included an interesting quote from Tim Sweeney, creator of the Unreal Engine: "Shared state concurrency is hopelessly intractable."

The point expounded upon in the presentation is that when you have thousands of mutable objects, say in a video game, that are updated many times per second, and each of which touches 5-10 other objects, manual synchronization is hopelessly useless. And if Tim Sweeney thinks it's an intractable problem, what hope is there for us mere mortals?

The rest of this presentation served as an introduction to the Erlang model of concurrency, wherein lightweight threads have no shared state between them. Rather, thread communication is performed by an asynchronous, nothing-shared message passing system. Erlang was created by Ericsson and has been used to create a variety of highly scalable industrial applications, as well as more familiar programs such as the ejabberd Jabber daemon.

This type of concurrency really looks to be the way forward to efficient utilization of multi-core systems, and I encourage everyone to at least play with Erlang a little to gain some perspective on this style of programming.

For a stylish introduction to the language from our Swedish friends, be sure to check out Erlang: The Movie.

http://www.algorithm.com.au/code/vimacs/

Tom Leonard, a programmer from Valve, gave a fascinating talk about this

Game developers are getting excited about technology like Erlang. A link to Extreme Concurrency and Erlang, an entertaining presentation by André Pang, was posted to the erlang-questions list by Miguel Rodríguez Rubinos on 12 April.

Vimacs

I guess this is why people keep whinging for an MDI interface.

Which I don't understand since the Photoshop people on Mac seem perfectly happy without MDI and no one says PS on Mac sucks because of it.

Ask and ye shall receive:
http://www.algorithm.com.au/albums/screenshots/lon g_gcc_cmdline.png