Thursday, November 15, 2007

Programming? What's That?

So it occurred to me that since I actually write code for a living, why haven't I posted anything related to Eclipse or Python (the former being basically my life at least 8 hours a day, and the latter being my favorite programming language). Hmm...I wonder if that says anything about my real interests?

Anyway - on to today's topic. I guess something that has been quite interesting (and also talked to death recently) has been Google's Android and their announcement of the Open Handset Alliance. I still find it amazing that me, being the tech nut that I am, still do not own a cell phone. I guess I have just never found one I would consider a) worth the money, and b) useful beyond making phone calls. I have dabbled with PDAs in the past, but nothing really impressed me. I think I would like a Crackberry, but the service is too damned expensive. The iPhone was mildly interesting for the cool technology factor, but so locked down it was ridiculous. And I could never see myself joining the "Apple crowd" anyway.

But I would buy a phone based on Android. Of course, I would probably go for a high-end model, or even take a shot a building up my own if that was an option. I think it would be really cool if a whole homebrew hardware community grew out of this as well. That would interest me.

What I find particularly interesting about this is how Google dealt with the whole Java <-> Sun mess. There is a very good summary of it here so I won't go into the details, but I am going to make a bold prediction:

The next language Google will announce (I say 'announce' because I'll wager an implementation already exists) for their Dalvik virtual machine will be Python.

Now *that* would be something. One can only hope.

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