Viewing profile — robin2

"Influential" can be tricky to pin down, but a couple of books that made a big impact on me at a certain age were "Prometheus Rising" by Robert Anton Wilson and "The Muse in the Ma…

My guess is that this might be cycling related; that an area where there's likely to be public-spirited cyclists with GPS devices is well placed to get good OSM coverage. In suppor…

Are you implying that if your only proverb is the one about hammers and nails then everything looks like a problem of misapplied technology?

I can't quite make up my mind whether its irony, or the other half of the same phenomenon, that humanities are feeling pressure to become more business-like whilst businesses are b…

> What makes you say that this was the "original intent" of patents? The original meaning of the word "patent" might be a bit of a clue here. The problem that patents tried to solv…

Slightly off topic, but Peter Seibel's take on the idea of code reading groups, and the idea of code as literature, is interesting: http://www.gigamonkeys.com/code-reading/ "Code i…

TL;DR? See http://www.slideshare.net/vgururao/usc-annenberg (slide 7 in particular) On a related point, am I the only one who notices the language coming out of the Silicon Valley …

"Pragmatic Thinking and Learning" was Andy Hunt, but as he and Dave Thomas are kind of a double act I can see why you'd get mixed up. As to your point about whether they wrote any …

There was a time when LinkedIn would often require you to re-enter you login details, seemingly at random. Login details consist, of course, of your email address plus a password, …

An odd thing about Alexander's work on pattern languages is that, despite people's enthusiasm, Alexander himself considered it to be a failure. There's a chapter in Richard Gabriel…

It's possibly worth mentioning that the original moon shots were - in a sense - exercises in publicity. OK, that's putting it a bit crudely, but if you read Kennedy's speech announ…

[Lightweight comment] The main thing that puts me off from learning Clojure is the name. I mean, why not go the whole hog and call it funargs4j?

For a different take, read Steve Albini's "The Problem with Music" ( http://www.negativland.com/news/?page_id=17 ) in which he does a financial breakdown of what he considered a re…

I'd have thought http://zedshaw.com/essays/c2i2_hypothesis.html would be more relevant here.

Projects can be canned for all sorts of reasons, but from what I recall the people involved in C3 blamed the Chrysler management. Perhaps the latter were more interested in having …

OK. Here goes nothing. I had a conversation with someone I know about what I wrote, and why I wrote it. Their comment was that without giving any explanation as to why I wrote what…

[Part II] In another comment, Mr Martin suggests that something like a guild system might be an appropriate for software development, and I'm assuming that 8th Light's interest in …

OK, challenge accepted. I've only just noticed that this thread continued, and to be honest I doubt anyone will read this - but seeing as Mr Martin's responses aren't unreasonable …

That's why they don't need to slander you - writing a lukewarm reference does the same job.

Well, ObjectMentor got paid, someone at the company got to tick a box to say that developers had been given appropriate training, and we got a break from real work. Corporate train…

In this case, I don't think the company can be blamed. As I recall, it hadn't asked for TDD training, it had asked for C++ training. So if anyone should be blamed it would be Objec…

To expand on that a bit, I should mention that this question came up at a software craftsmanship meetup, after Martin had given a talk in Cambridge. (Incidentally, people who had s…

If I wanted to be pedantic I'd say that you'd really want a heart transplant done by a surgeon, not a doctor... That said, I think the real questions is: who is Robert Martin, self…