One of the people I read on LiveJournal was talking on LiveJournal about her run-ins with Neil Gaiman. This got me thinking about my prize possession from Fiddler’s Green (and I came back with a LOT of crap from FGCon).

That prize possesion is the following autographed Gimme the Brain card:

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There’s just a few tweaks I’d like to make to Java that would make my life MUCH nicer:

1. Method arguments may not be null unless they are declared nullable (probably by putting a ? after the type name: “foo(Object? obj)”).
2. Method arguments may not be assigned in the body of the argument (assumed to be “final”).

Anyone have a good way of doing this? Or am I just stuck?

I think I was spoiled by lex and yacc.

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They’ve accepted my hands-on proposal: “Agile Development Using a Functional Language”.

WTF? I figured that was a certain bomb. I was just pitching it out there as a lark.
Even one of the reviewers said “probably will be interesting to some attendees, but i expect small turnout.” I already had some research done for the TFP, though, and I’d like the motivation to play with test-driven development using OCaml or F#.

So I guess I am going to Agile2007.

Now I just have to figure out how to do Agile development using a functional language…

Well. Shit.

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Story #1 for Agile 2007 is out. We’ll see about Story #2…but, of the two, that was the one I consider less likely.

Well. Shit.

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So, I was listening to the seminars over at the Long Now Foundation (well worth the time to listen to, IMHO), and hit the one about why foxes are better at predicting then hedgehogs. You can pretty much stop reading at this point, as nothing else I’m going to say is going to be as interesting (especially the Vernor Vinge interview). But it inspired me to go back over my record. Specifically, the last time I sat down and tried to make serious, concrete predictions- which was at Bogonomicon (which is now dead, if the “last updated in 2003″ isn’t enough of a clue).

Unfortunately for me, the score isn’t good. Of nine predictions I made, only one inarguably came true. And half of a second one. But I hope to score some points for 1) being intellectually honest enough to admit I’m wrong, and 2) being wrong for interesting reasons. More after the break.
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