Perhaps Paul Graham was more right than he knew when he posted Hackers and Painters.

• I should have realized that I linked Avi Bryant twice, because I did look at the Elide site before I posted, and I actually had read the Elide paper -- I almost commented on it, but Avi's explanation of his work is what I got out of the paper, so that's fine.

  What was more interesting to me was this post to ruby-talk where he said:

  I believe that the only way Ruby will ever be able to have the same level of tool support (of any kind, whether we're talking about code browsers, refactoring tools, or version control systems) that Smalltalk does is by making the same sacrifice that Smalltalk did: to completely avoid any form of code generation or macros. It's not an easy sacrifice to make - as someone used to Lisp, I found it very hard to come to terms with - but as long as the language is dynamic enough in other ways, I'm beginning to think it's worth making.

  My question is, are you saying it's impossible to do good tool support in the face of macros, or is it hard?
• In another post, Avi pointed to monotone, another candidate for a version control system. I need to take a deeper look when I have some more time.

• Richard Demers and Chris Double had more to say about exceptions. Richard quoted Kent Beck:

  When you use exception handling, you have to think like the writer of a new programming language, not just an application developer.

  But we are creating languages when we develop OOP systems....

  Chris talked about some ways hes used resumable exceptions.

If one of you Safari wizards has a hint on what I can do to fix this, please let me know. If you want to give me a MacOS X machine to test on, send mail.

Its interesting that aggregators that are most used are SharpReader, NetNewsWire, Radio Userland, and Syndirella. So the Mac folks are high on the blogerati list.