2006 - My Favorite Picks from the Blogosphere

Oh it's that time of the continuum when we look back at the passing of one more year and contemplate what it meant to each one of us in the broader spectrum of life. I am not trying to be cynical or delve into the psyco-analysis of what went wrong in the last 365 days of the calendar .. Here is a peek to my-best-of-2006 from the blogosphere ..

In no particular order ::

Stevey's Good Agile, Bad Agile

For all agilists, the party is over. Steve Yeggey is on song tearing apart the agile purists with the good-agile of Google. Great read.

Sriram's Lisp is Sin

A fascinating walk down the road of the language of Gods. This post has been discussed in various forums by a multitude of Lisp practitioners.

Joel's Development Abstraction Layer

A programmer's sole activity is to produce beautiful code, but it needs layers of abstraction from the organization to create a software product out of it in the market. He concludes with an analogy of Dolly Parton's performance being supported by the leakproof abstractions provided by the incredible infrastructure of managers, musicians, recording technicians, record companies, roadies, hairdressers, and publicists behind her.

Jao's Category Theory with Bananas

A very good introduction to category theory in programming languages.

Ola Bini on The Dark Ages of programming languages

Ola Bini's search continues for the next programming language that does not suck - very well written by one of the prolific programmers of today.

Another Joel's Gem : Can your Programming Language Do This ?

An eye opener to all schools who have started teaching Java as the first programming language. Once again Joel highlights the importance of functional programming through evangelizing the map/reduce techniques.

Personally ...

2006 was the year when

• I started blogging - two months down the line I will be celebrating the first anniversary of my Ruminations blog.



• I attended the first JavaOne of my life - it was exciting to be among the millions of Java programmers swarming inside the Moscone Center.



• I made my first venture into the Ruby land and lived up to a promise that I will learn at least one new programming language this year. Incidentally I have also started playing around with Scala .. my initial impressions are very good. 2007 will definitely see me closer to the languages of the Gods, to rediscover the joy of programming.



• I finally came out of the EJB fiasco and dug deep into the Spring experience, along with the usual accompaniments of Hibernate and the rest of the lightweight stack elements. EJB3 is better than EJB2, but Spring is way ahead.



• I became a huge fan of AOP.

That's all, folks. Would be eager to hear out from all of you about any of your interesting reads in 2006. Finally, I would like to sign off 2006 with the following revelation from Paul Graham :

The pointy-haired boss is a manager who doesn't program. So the surest way to avoid becoming him is to stay a programmer. What tempts programmers to become managers are companies with old-fashioned corporate structure, where the only way to advance in salary and prestige is to go into management. So if you want to avoid becoming a PHB, avoid such companies, and work for (or start) startups.

There's the spirit, that's the spirit, the spirit of a programmer - be a programmer, remain a programmer and have respect for hacker oriented programming languages (aka Lisp). My goal for 2007 - to get more enlightened into the eval land, which John McCarthy laid out way back in the 1960s.

Happy Holidays !!