Randy MacDonald on the pragprog mailing-list, regarding choosing programming languages that "make you think more"

I'm not sure "made me walk more than any other car I've used." would be complimentary.

An exchange between Aiden Rogers and Steven Rogers on the rubycocoa mailing-list:

(Aiden) Does anyone have any suggestions on how to obfuscate a RubyCocoa application?

(Steven) Write it in Perl?

An aside about RubyCocoa, the framework that allegedly allows you to write Mac OS X applications in Ruby.

I say "allegedly", because in order to multithread a RubyCocoa app effectively, you have to apply an unofficial, hard to get hold of source patch to the Ruby interpreter and recompile. This makes developing and distributing a RubyCocoa application particularly messy, to say the least, unless you want to be stuck with an unresponsive toy app that does everything in the main UI thread.

My fantasy announcement for this year's WWDC would be that Apple was going to start supporting one of the scripting-language bridges (either RubyCocoa or PyObjC) as an official strategy for the platform.

The much maligned Cocoa-Java bridge was never a good idea: partly because the statically-typed Java language was such a bad fit for the pervasively dynamically-typed Cocoa framework, and partly because the Java language itself isn't really that much of an improvement over Objective C.

Either Ruby or Python would be a much more natural second language for Cocoa development. Their dynamism makes them a great fit for the framework, and they offer significantly enhanced developer productivity over Objective-C, only having to drop down to the lower-level language for performance-critical sections.

I can dream, I guess.