I'm not convinced about the perceived difficulty to learn git et al. You and the other FreeBSD developers are OS hackers. You're telling me it's hard for them to learn a dvcs in a few days? Look at all the Rails developers and users. They seem to have few problems switching to git.
Many languages focus more and more on multi-core and distributed programming. Mainstream language like Java and C# will get more tools and libraries, but other languages will likely be better. One thing i like about startups is that you can freely pick technologies that are better or faster in solving a problem. You don't have to cope with the conservatism problem.
Personally i think that languages like Scala, F# and Erlang will be good to learn, depending on what platform you prefer. And Clojure also seems very cool. I know it's blasphemy around here, but Clojure is the only Lisp like language that i would like to learn.
I'm a small investor and i get free real time streaming data for Euronext Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris from my broker. It also shows the outstanding orders in the order book. It's fun to watch but if you observe closely it is very obvious that trading (instead of investing) is a game for the big boys who use intricate financial models and a massive amount of computing power. It's like competing directly with Google.
> So type inference. You can do type inference. Except that it's lame, because it doesn't handle weird dynamic features like upconverting integers to Doubles when they overflow.
Pretty weak argument against type inference. Yegge has used OCaml so i expected better arguments.
And JavaScript 2 is getting type annotations, so the trend is more likely in the other direction to improve performance.
> When I tested the service I had something very similar to the “Aha!” feeling that ran through me the first time I ever used Google. In short, it is an evolutionary, and possibly revolutionary, step forward in search
Google's search engine wasn't revolutionary either. It was only moderately better than AltaVista and others. Most of all the visual design was cleaner. Google's main accomplishment was imo the introduction of AdSense.
> I wouldn't be surprised if Google is working on its own competitor to Flash/Silverlight.
Microsoft has big problems getting Silverlight off the ground, although it is imo technically superior to Flash. I don't think it would be easier for Google to launch a competing platform. I personally think that they will bet on HTML5 through their partnership with Mozilla.
About a year ago i looked at the WordPress code. My PHP knowledge is limited, but it was easy to see that the code was not very good. Perhaps it has improved, but i personally wouldn't use it, especially on a server that runs important services.
Even the openness is not what i was expecting last year. So what if it runs on Linux? You're stuck with whatever the Android SDK supports and you have to use Java.
Perhaps you'd like Microsoft's PowerShell if you have to use Windows. Microsoft is slowly realizing that many people like to use command line tools, especially for managing servers.
What in a Unix environment makes you more productive? The GUI of OSX is quite different from Gnome or KDE. Is it the command line with tools like grep?