Why should I forget VMware or any other virtualization product? They also give you 95% of native performance and a full-screen X on top of that.

With 2GB RAM becoming the norm and stand-by mode having replaced power on/off cycles, I have no issues running two systems side-by-side on my laptop at all times.

If I remember correctly, Ruby doesn't have Unicode support either. Shit, some languages don't even have built-in strings.

I think that is sort of the point people are trying to make. Pretty much every language messes this up badly. It would be nice to see something learned from those mistakes.

Seems like some languages are getting the point. While looking for a resource about Unicode support, I saw promising things as well as inauspicious. Seems like multibyte character support would be a good thing to catalog for programming languages (specs as well as implementations)

Ruby doesn't, but it's regarded as a mistake and (afaik) is fixed in 1.9.

That is especially ironic when you consider that its creator is Japanese. So let me get this right... a language designed by a non-native-English-speaking individual can gain massive popularity without Unicode support, but an American who has no interest in Unicode is supposed to do it anyways? How does that make sense?

Ruby has always had excellent support for Japanese, though.

bingo. the japanese don't like unicode.

Because of UniHan?

You can use Unicode in Ruby 1.8, it's just not very convenient.

I am not sure what "spirit of open source", that the blog post refers to means, but what Apple did isn't looking nice from any angle.

Hold on, I thought in Delphi you still have to separate constants, typedefs, variables and code into different blocks, no?

True, but in classical Pascal they should go in particular order, and that's what K. is complaining about (no wonder), while for Turbo/Object the order is not important. That was a purely syntactic obstacle and nothing serious.

Now they must realize how important it is to force-upgrade everybody to IE8 via Windows Update mechanism.

Pick a language that you love. That will probably happen to be something not very mainstream. All not-very-mainstream languages suffer from the lack of good, quality libraries to one degree or another.

Fix it. Since you mentioned OCaml, I assume you like it. I suggest you look at Python libraries (very mature bunch) and port something you like over to OCaml.

Permanent relief from the password hell. And it should NOT be a "keyring solution".

It isn't perfect, but I swear by GenPass for this -> http://labs.zarate.org/passwd/

You mean an openID like system that doesn't suck?

VA is the most promising startup of all YC companies I've heard of, if you ask me. Under-hyped and over-delivering.

National Instruments (Austin, TX) used to do that alot and it worked great. They start with some code critique and then slowly, starting with "how would you re-write this from scratch?" they get you to write some, following by popular "optimize for speed/memory" and so on.

I just recently had somewhat similar idea: to reverse tables and ask them to interview me. Not the typical "how do you like it here?" kind, but I want to ask people to ask me technical questions and see what they can come up with.