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• Ars Book Review: "Patent Failure" - Interesting book review about the effect of patents on an industry. Apparently cost more money than they make in anything but chemical and pharmaceuticals.
• Lucky to be a Programmer - I don't program as much as I used to but this explains why I love to when I get the chance.
• WordPress 2.6 - Usual drill. I've upgraded to the latest version of Wordpress, the underlying software of ZX81.org.uk. If you see anything wrong please let me know!
• 20 Amazing Facts About  Voting in the USA - Still in any doubt that computerised voting machines are a bad idea for free and fair elections?

• Apple introduces new Apple TV software, lowers hardware pricing - Now potentially more useful with the movie rentals. But where is the price drop in the UK?!
• Dell tells customer ‘Mac is good option’ - “Now, it’s possible that the techie was referring to a 1970s rock band, or to an item of waterproof clothing. But we can’t help concluding that he was indeed talking about Apple’s operating system.”
• Steve Jobs gets cohesive - Some cool stuff from Apple at the MacExpo. I think the Time Capsule is going to be on my shopping list when it ships next month. The movie rentals (when they get to the UK) look interesting but they really need to build their catalogue!
• How to recognise a good programmer - Great discussion on recognising great developers. The problem would seem to be finding them! Most recruiters just pattern match on CVs which tends to favour the “career” developer.

You tend to find two things relating to programming languages on the Internet. The first is a long list of all the languages, often with links to a representative web site. The second category are the “representative” web sites, detailed descriptions of a particular language.

I hope to make this part of ZX81.org.uk to be the middle-ground. I won’t cover every language ever designed and nor will I cover them in vast amounts of detail. Instead I’ll look at each languages main features, advantages and flaws.

What makes me qualified to write these critiques? Well, I’ve used all of the languages covered so far on at least one non-trivial project and at university I did a lot of programming language design and compiler development courses.

The two languages I’ve covered so far are the major Unix stalwarts Perl and C.