@adrianh suggests looking more at Parrot Compiler Toolkit ... which is very cool.

I'm finding that language design is hard. Not just the implementation part (although that's hard too) ... but just figuring out how to make a syntax that allows all the things you'd expect to be done in an elegant way.

I'm starting to appreciate how clever certain common design patterns are in language design, and how hard it is to deviate from them. More on this soon ...

Ian Bicking on what PHP deployment gets right.

I'm playing with pipelining in Python over on Composing.

Here's an interesting question (after reading this).

Why does anyone want to write "large" programs? Everyone knows large programs are difficult to build and maintain. Want we want is *small* programs that happen to be powerful (do a lot) and scale over large numbers of users. Is there any reason to think that "large" program correlates with either of these things?

Supplimentary question. Are 10 programs of 1000 lines each, which have to nevertheless interact (via pipes or XML-RPC calls etc.) actually any easier than one 10000 line program?

Update : Folknology has been making a pretty decent case for Erlang as a language optimized for writing software as a swarm of small programs.

Discipulus, patterns for programmers.

LOLCODE IZ IN UR COMPUTR RUNNG THINGZ

Python on Silverlight?

I'm intrigued despite myself.