A couple of interesting articles about debugging. Debugging doesn’t seem to get a lot of attention when people are taught about programming, I assume you’re supposed to acquire this skill by osmosis, but it is actually one of those skills that should receive much greater attention because it’s one of those that separates highly productive developers from, well, not so productive ones.

Why I’m Productive in Clojure. I’ve long been a fan of Lisp and Lisp-like languages, even though I wasn’t originally that happy with having Lisp inflicted on me when I was at university. Because it was weird and back then I didn’t much appreciate non-mainstream languages. These days I do because that’s where you usually find better expressiveness and ideas supposedly too strange for mainstream languages. I guess that makes me a language hipster.

Like pretty much every other programmer with a Mac, I’m currently looking at Swift. Will I write anything but toy programs in it? I don’t know yet - I don’t really write any Mac-ish software on my Mac,  just unix-ish programs. If Swift doesn’t escape the OS X and iOS ecosystems it’ll be a nice exercise in a neat language that’s not really that relevant to the world at large, or at least to my part of the world at large. Not that this sort of vendor lock-in can’t work well - Visual Basic 6, anybody?