I came across an article yesterday about programming languages, which hit on oneof my major peeves, so I can't resist responding. The article is at greythumb.org,and it's called Programmer's rant: what should and should not be added to C/C++.It's a variation on the extremely common belief that C and C++ are the best languages to use when you need code to run fast. They're not. They're good at things that need to get very close to the hardware - not in the efficiency sense, but in the sense of needing to be able to fairly directly munge the stack, address specific hardware registers, etc. But...

The last couple of years more and more people have been moving towards Agile development. These techniques aren’t new, most we’re devised in the 80s or 90s. But finally these days programmers and (more importantly) business consultants, architects and clients have learned to love and embrace Agile development.Evolving requirementsIt has now become common knowledge that you can’t write down all the requirements before you start the project. These requirements have to be written down in an evolutionary matter. In short cycles/sprints we build pieces of the pro...