Do The Simplest Thing

Congratulations to Bill Seitz on launching his Personal Finance startup / project.

My Simulations

Over the years I've done a few agent based simulations to look at questions that interest me.

Here's a quick Bootstrap page to get at them.

Strapdown.js

Very cool : Strapdown.js - Instant and elegant Markdown documents

Dog : A Social Language

Dog seems to be a little language for writing social software.

Initial thoughts :

Big question is what it compiles to. It's about time we had a programming language that compiles a single program down to parts that run on both server and clients, in a really easy and transparent way.

Building in knowledge of protocols like http and json and making services like twitter at least members of the standard library is a good idea.

Like most programmers, I'm sceptical of the  "easy English-like" nature of it. We've had plenty of time to learn that what's hard in programming is the logical thinking not the strange syntax. (Update : See my Quora answer)

But if Dog can become a little-language which makes it easy to configure and administrate social software back-ends then it will be very useful. Particularly if there are ways of compiling the same program down to multiple back-ends (Django, Rails, Chicago Boss etc.)

Project Schema

This is awesome : Project Schema combines mind-mapping with management of parts of a CAD model.