I just got off the phone with IBM Thinkpad support. Turns out I have to replace the entire keyboard. For around 50 dollars. That's a lot for a single keycap. Anybody know an online thinkpad junkyard? (Yes, I've checked eBay.) All I need is a keycap.

For many years I read Bob Martin's postings in comp.object, and learned a lot from them. I've read his book Designing Object Oriented C++ Applications Using The Booch Method where he described many if his ideas on dependency management. I got a chance to meeting him a few years ago at Software Development West when I sat in on his Extreme Programming tutorial. I had read some stuff on XP, but I didn't really understand the Test Driven Development side of it until I watched Bob's tutorial. The goal of the tutorial was to design a program to score bowling. First Bob did it the "heavy process" way, asking for possible objects and all of that. Then he asked us to set that aside and walk through it with him as he did it the TDD way. I was very impressed with the result. The code was tighter, cleaner, and smaller than the code for the "fully object-oriented" version could have been.

So read with interest his new blog entry, Are Dynamic Languages Going to Replace Static Languages?. He did an experiment and here are some of his finding:

I thought an experiment was in order. So I tried writing some applications in Python, and then Ruby (well known dynamically typed languages). I was not entirely surprised when I found that type issues simply never arose. My unit tests kept my code on the straight and narrow. I simply didn't need the static type checking that I had depended upon for so many years. I also realized that the flexibility of dynamically typed langauges makes writing code significantly easier. Modules are easier to write, and easier to change. There are no build time issues at all. Life in a dynamically typed world is fundamentally simpler.

Very interesting... more and more smart, respected people are coming to the conclusion that we can do better than Java/C#, etc. The only thing I can fault in the article is the omission of Lisp in his list of dynamic languages.

If this is going to come true, then the Lisp language community needs to get its act together and deal with the balkanization and fragmentation of Lisp like languages. I was hoping that Paul Graham's Arc would be such a language, but Paul seems to have gone dark on Arc while he's eradicating spam. Before Arc, there was Dylan, and maybe that still has a chance to rise from its ashes.