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Have a look at http://moose.perl.org/ - it ain't your grandaddy's Perl.

Compare this simple Python class with the equivalent post-modern Perl

package OurClass;
use Moose;
has ‘arg1’ => (
        is => ‘rw’
);
has ‘arg2’ => (
        is => ‘rw’
);
sub printargs {
        my $self = shift;
        say $self->arg1;
        say $self->arg2;
}
no Moose;

The short story "Dogfight" from the Burning Chrome collection has a young street criminal discover that he has a talent that could bring him a legitimate source of income and friends.

Since it's my answer to the title question, you can guess that it doesn't end well. The whole story's online here and a couple of other places.

The chart from TFA:

http://tirania.org/s/71de890b.png

Whoa. Those benchmarks show Java/JVM about 7 times slower than C#/DLR. (I thought "DLR" in TFA was a typo, but it's correct. DLR stands for Dynamic Language Runtime.)

I'm not entirely surprised. I remember reading the history of IronPython, where Jim Hugunin (the original author of Jython, which is Python running on the JVM) did some experiments with the CLR, intending to prove how sucky and lousy the CLR was; instead, he found that the CLR was faster than the JVM, and he went ahead and created IronPython to run on the CLR.

steveha

An AC is not just a person, it's "something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Tacoma. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... abraded genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by banging out trolls and flamebait on its wireless keyboard."

(With apologies to William Gibson and Cory Doctorow)

the 3D director's cut where Jake and Neytiri plug their hair together in the love scene {ooooh!}

We jacked, straight across. ....
Ordinarily I get the raw material in a studio situation, filtered through several million dollars' worth of baffles, and I don't even have to see the artist. The stuff we get out to the consumer, you see, has been structured, balanced, turned into art. There are still people naive enough to assume that they'll actually enjoy jacking straight across with someone they love. I think most teenagers try it, once. Certainly it's easy enough to do; Radio Shack will sell you the box and the trodes and the cables. But me, I'd never done it. And now that I think about it, I'm not so sure I can explain why. Or that I even want to try.

I do know why I did it with Lise, sat down beside her on my Mexican futon and snapped the optic lead into the socket on the spine, the smooth dorsal ridge, of the exoskeleton. It was high up, at the base of her neck, hidden by her dark hair.

William Gibson, "The Winter Market", 1985.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Winter_Market
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/burning_chrome.shtml#market

Best cyberpunk short story ever? It might just be.

I wrote IronPython in Action for Manning Publications. Working with a publisher greatly improved the book, but it is still a long and arduous process. I wrote up my experience with Manning (good points and bad points): http://www.voidspace.org.uk/python/articles/technical-writing.shtml

Only since Python and particularly Ruby fans started using it as a way to market a feature in their pet language (dynamic typing coupled with dynamic dispatch) that's been available in existing languages for *many* years. It's a marketing term, nothing more. It adds nothing to the actual discussion, other than to sound all neat and cutsey.

Standardized terminology adds quite a lot to any discussion.

And I would define it as dynamic typing and binding. Nothing more. The language determines, at run time, how to bind a method call to an object. It's just that simple.

What do you call what Ocaml does?

Templates, on the other hand, are realized at compile time.

C++ templates are a turing-complete functional programming language, and are executed by the compiler. What you think of as "compile time" is the same as "runtime" for the templates.

What I should've said is that duck typing == dynamic dispatch + dynamic typing. Either way, it's hardly a new idea. And it's an idea that does *not* fit in a language that's meant to be strongly, statically typed (eg, C++).

The principle of duck typing says that you shouldn't care what type of object you have - just whether or not you can do the required action with your object.
CeePlusPlus: Templates can create compile-time polymorphism via DuckTyping (as used in AndreiAlexandrescu's ModernCeePlusPlusDesign as well as Microsoft's ActiveTemplateLibrary).
In computer programming, duck typing is a style of dynamic typing in which an object's current set of methods and properties determines the valid semantics, rather than its inheritance from a particular class or implementation of a specific interface. [...]"when I see a bird that walks like a duck and swims like a duck and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck."

Duck typing does not require dynamic dispatch, and does not (strictly) require dynamic typing. All it requires is that what matters is "I have a multiply() method" rather than "I am a number".

"War Machine: Rogue Trooper" is one of the best graphic novels ever made.

http://www.voidspace.org.uk/cyberpunk/rogue.shtml

And it would be very easy to translate it into a movie script. It reads like one already.

I was hoping to find something with a GUI

Then you should have put this as a requirement in your query. But I would ask WHY you want a gui? Backups should be set-and-forget! My USB sticks have multi-platform autorun scripts to execute my backup. I only need an interface if I choose to expand or shrink the backup set--I can edit a text file that has the list of what to exclude.

and that was easier to put on a portable hard drive than Python.

Python is pretty easy to put on a portable hard drive and there are multiple portable versions.

Not only is it nicer looking than either SONY reader or Amazon Kindle, but the ebooks are free etexts and public domain etexts.

Windows Forms is a way to create native, rich client GUI applications with .NET. Programs created with Windows Forms can be extremely good looking, and fully programmable IronPython.

IronPython [1] is an implementation of Python 2.4 written in C#. This means it integrates fully with the Microsoft .NET framework 2.0 and Mono. You can natively use .NET classes from within IronPython.

and for a practical example set your wayback machine to January 15 1990 and try to make a long distance call inside the US
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/technology/hacker_crac kdown/hack_part1.shtml
The crash was a grave corporate embarrassment. The "culprit" was a bug in AT&T's own software (caused by a stray semicolon)

Does this sound like Saint Shapely to anyone else?

Huh. Of all the visions of the future William Gibson wrote about, I never expected Virtual Light would turn out to be the accurate one.

The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined.
William Gibson

I bet if Turner is still in one piece he could get him out.

And I'll hear it again when finally when the day comes where he announces he "lost" the bet. And it will be on slashdot again.

And I guess I'll hear it again when finally it is confirmed by some observation or math.

I think the other bet mentioned involving a penthouse magazine subscription is this one about the existance of black holes

What are laws good for if the universe doesn't obey them ?

So personally I think the information is still somewhere, though I don't think in any useful, accesible or detectable form. I have this quasi-religious belief that the universe keeps track of everything.

Also, if a quantum entangled pair of atomic or subatomic particles gets divided by the appearance of the hole, there is still a connection between them. I guess that would be a rare event though and only happen during black hole formation, and it would be really unlikely to stay unchanged and unobserved.

I would have read the NYT article, but it seems /.ed and I didn't fint it witg google cache.

You may find the Mind machine FAQ helpful. There are a lot of machines out there, some of which which cost considerably less than the novadreamer ($500 with bundled materials) and while they may not be as compact many of them are probably a lot more adjustable. I have not had the opportunity to try a mind machine as a sleep inducer but I did try one at a spa and can confirm that they do mess with your head and stimulate interesting mental imagery. Brain Wave Software is also availble for windoze (emulator compatible) with a 30 day trial. Note that flashing a computer screen is not as good as LED glasses which can flash over a wider range of frequencies without beating with the screen refresh frequency or being effected by phosphor decay and also the LED glasses work with your eyes closed.

I guess you just can't make money selling Batmobiles

... the physicist John Wheeler once calculated that if one took all the heavy water in all the oceans of the world, one could build a hydrogen bomb that would compress matter at the center so much that a black hole would be created.