Cliff Schmidt of BEA has joined the Java.net blogging stable with a post about what standards mean to customers. The most important W is Why. (When I think of "Why", I always think of the scene in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, where Kirk tells Lt. Saavik "You have got to learn why things work on a starship".) In this case, why is important because if you know why customers feel standards are important, you may be able to offer them an alternative that doesn't suffer from some of the problems of the standardization process.

When I worked at Taligent and Apple in the mid 90's, there was a T-shirt that you'd see a lot. It said "Windows 95 = Macintosh 89". And it was true. Unfortunately, it was also true (but never spoken) that "Macintosh 95 = Macintosh 89". Fortunately (mostly) for Macintosh users, that's no longer true -- the Macintosh platform is growing and evolving, at least in a technical sense.

Lisp is largely in the same place, except that the time period is longer. This post was prompted by Philip Greenspun's post "What do they do at the Lisp Conference?" and to a lesser extent by a pointer to the Symbolics Museum. Now, I've been posting away about the virtues of Lisp and Lisp like languages in an effort to educate folks about what Lisp can do. But I certainly don't think that there's no room for advancement. So it was a little disturbing to read this

Could he be right? Is old-style Common Lisp or Scheme actually the best that we can do?

in Greenspun's post. Not because Greenspun believes it, but because I think a lot of people in the Lisp community appear to believe it. It's not enough to say Python/Ruby/C#/Java 2003 = Lisp 1982.

Hans Nowak has written an article covering 10 Python pitfalls.

I'm sure that many of us spent some of today playing tech support due to the W32.Blaster worm. Aside from all the usual commentary on this, I'd like to point out a pair of projects:

Vault is a Microsoft Research project to provide a safe version of C.

Cyclone is joint project between Cornell and AT&T Labs to do the same.

There are also some OS level technques for dealing with buffer-overrun problems. How many more incidents like this will it take to push something like Vault or Cyclone into mainstream use as a replacement for C. Why aren't the Vault tools written as plugins for Visual Studio? This time around, we lucked out because whoever wrote W32.Blaster didn't do a good job. But if it had been written more like Slammer? It's too bad we can't send the wasted time invoice to Microsoft. We could all probably get enough to pay for our Windows licenses.

• [via lemonodor] Dick Gabriel's Patterns of Software
• The Unicode Standard, Version 4.0