"JavaScript is a poorly thought out language considering it's influences were Scheme and Smalltalk."-Gilad Bracha

"...it got lucky. It's in a crucial place. It simply fell into the right place in the universe. It's very important and we are relatively lucky because a lot worse could have happened! JavaScript is a wonderful assembly language in my view.

 My view is that people should not be programming the web directly in JavaScript, they should program it in whatever they want. They should compile it down and the browser is evolving into the operating system and as it evolves it becomes more and more adequate as a target...

 ...I really don't want to see a world where people are forced to always program in the one true language... Right? I worked for a compay that tried to force that down the world's throat..."-Gilad Bracha

Great podcast. You should give it listen..  Quoted from the, oh so Teutonic, software engineering radio podcast (link below)...
 
http://www.se-radio.net/podcast/2009-07/episode-140-newspeak-and-pluggable-ty...
 
[Sent from my iPhone 3GS]

You've Gotta Hand it to Larry!

Ellison Moves Quickly to Push Aside IBM, Plunges Into Competitive Server Market - WSJ.com:

"One person familiar with the situation said IBM's final offer over the weekend was closer to the latter figure, making Oracle's $9.50 offer a financially better alternative in the view of Sun's board and more likely to close. Oracle has to pay Sun a $260 million breakup fee if it terminates the transaction.

Another person said IBM was pressing Sun's board to revoke change-of-control provisions that would give a large number of Sun executives two years of salary in the event of a sale. Yet another person familiar with the matter said Oracle didn't hesitate to accept those provisions, characterizing them as 'a rounding error' to the software giant."

"The One Best Way"

"To assess his efficiency, the store's computer takes into account everything from the kinds of merchandise he's bagging to how his customers are paying. Each week, he gets scored. If he falls below 95% of the baseline score too many times, the 185-store megastore chain, based in Walker, Mich., is likely to bounce him to a lower-paying job, or fire him."
...
"The brains behind Meijer's system is a consulting and software company known for decades as H.B. Maynard & Co., which last year became the Operations Workforce Optimization unit of Accenture Ltd. Borrowing from time-motion concepts first developed for U.S. steel mills and factory floors, it breaks down tasks such as working a cash register into quantifiable units and devises standard times to complete them, called "engineered labor standards. Then it writes software to help clients keep watch over their work forces."
The title of this post was nicked from Robert Kanigels tome about Frederick Winslow Taylor

 which I read when it was originally published. If I remember correctly, the stress and monotony of the "Engineered Labor Standards" was offset by higher pay.  Taylor was quoted in the book as asking a worker, "are you a high priced man?",  meaning he would be well paid for the work if he met the standards. Didn't pickup that point in the article.