Two other debates to watch or listen to

Both of these are worth listening to or watching:

NPR.org hosted a Third-Party debate featuring Gary Johnson, of the Libertarian Party, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party. Link includes a transcript.

And Bill O’Reilly and Jon Stewart recently had a fun, and thought provoking debate in The Air-Conditioned Auditorium that is notable for the frankness of discussion and the fact that there was a real back-and-forth between them.

A reading of Tim Berglund’s “Oh, The Methods You’ll Compose”

Transcription: “Oh, The Methods You’ll Compose”.

When a coder sits down to start banging out code
The first thing to start crowding his cognitive load
Is whether his program will do what it should
Correctness, he says, is what makes my code good

It’s the function that captures the coder’s attention
Behaviors and inputs and outputs are mentioned
As if the one good that a coder can bring
Is to spin the right wheels on some Turing machine

And compiling and linking and running are great
(We need to do these to put food on our plate!)
But the shocker that might leave you scratching your head
Is that actual code is less written than read

We spend more of our time in maintaining our stuff
Than we ever spend writing the simplest of cruft
Which means that unless you’ve got something the matter
You’ll try to learn just a few code style patterns

So coders and countrymen, lend me your ears
As I teach you some lessons won hard through the years
From that Beckian book about implementation
And patterns that derail code suckification

Read the rest.

Open Source Projects and Poisonous People

Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman, authors of the new O’Reilly book, “Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others”, had a great talk at Google I/O 2008 that is a must watch, Open Source Projects and Poisonous People:

There is great value in taking advice like this and turning it towards myself. By working to not be poisonous, I can encourage, lift up, empower and embolden. It’s a balancing act I’m working on and is reflected in Joe Campbell, a friend and co-worker, recent post “Gentle Strenth – Wizdom Applied”.

I’m looking forward to reading “Team Geek: A Software Developer’s Guide to Working Well with Others”.

(original post about the book is via Boing Boing)

Non-Metal Iron Maiden Covers

YouTube: naddani: Wasted Years (Iron Maiden) – Acoustic cover:

YouTube: Thomas Zwijsen: Classical/Acoustic: Iron Maiden acoustic – Wasted Years:

YouTube: JonathanHarpa: Iron Maiden in harp and guitar – Hallowed be thy name:

YouTube: vkgoeswild: Iron Maiden – Run To The Hills – piano cover:

YouTube: WonkyFonk: Iron Maiden – Hallowed Be Thy Name (acoustic):

YouTube: ThomasZwijsen2007: Bruce Dickinson – Tears Of The Dragon (Acoustic):

YouTube: Jcronk: Folkified Hallowed Be Thy Name:

YouTube: hampusvh2: Iron Maiden – The Trooper (Piano):

Related:

Metafilter: “Thomas Zwijsen performs Nylon Maiden”

Thought Provokers From Python’s Guido Van Rossum and Clojure’s Rich Hickey

At Strange Loop 2011 Clojure’s Rich Hickey gave a presentation (video) on programming and simplicity that rankled some feathers and triggered a heated discussion at reddit.

Duncan McGreggor, decided to contact Python’s Guido Van Rossum to interview him about his keynote talk at PyCon US 2012 (video), specifically his thoughts on callbacks.