What do you do?

Have you ever been asked, "What do you do?". My beautiful wife and I have the luxury of meeting new people quite often and we receive that question a lot. I've never really reflected on my answer and I always respond with "I'm a software developer". Maybe its the Cold & Flue medicine or maybe it is my ADD afflicting me again but I am curious: Why are we compelled to answer with your chosen (or not) profession. Is it just conditioning because of the original Feudalism system and/or the apprenticeship methodologies.
Back when I was slinging meet at Burger King I had never answered with "I am a fast food customer service agent". Now, I am not saying I don't identify myself as a "Software Developer" as I am definitely a geek ed out coder; but I am curious about mans auto response system.

Twitter is the new thing?

Seems like just yesterday that all the digerati were chasing cpu and fsb clock speeds to publish to the world that you were elite or not. However, today it seems to be the next instant messaging application as if mankind wasn't connected to society enough. I blogged earlier about my all-time favorite IM client Meebo. It is still my favorite for the following:

• NO INSTALL!
• NO Logs on your machine.
• Connects to all 3 of my instant message services I use.

Today I read a post from Jeff Atwood who is one of my favorite daily blog reads regarding 'the new thing' called Twitter. I read the guide, downloaded a client called MadTwitter and here I am.
While I am a firm believer as Jeff in "making it public"; I'm not sure how twitter is neat or convenient but I'm willing to give it a few days to see if it clicks with me. As I explore the world of twitter and public noise I'm post back

To Be Human, or the cost of your convictions

Last night I found myself watching the Green Mile again with my beautiful wife of 15 years. For those that haven't seen this work of art; I highly recommend it. The part that is interesting to me is the sub-plot of the prison guard and the choices he must make. One of these sub-plots is the prison guard dealing with the cost of his convictions and carrying them out.
In a radical case of coincidence, I ran across this blog posting that is discussing a liberal movement in Texas that is discussing this very same topic except in modern day occurences.
disclaimer: I am not a liberal by any stretch of the imagination; I am an outspoken Progressive.

Languages that aren't used?

I saw this article a few weeks ago but I hadn't had a chance to *really* read it until this morning (we'll talk about what really reading in yet another post later). Two of the languages in the article strike way to close to home: Haskell & Delphi.

While my Delphi development today is relegated to a small portion of my active crafting; I still actively develop in current versions of the program. While I agree with the author that the language went from popular to obscurity in a relatively short period; I hesitate to say that it means the language did not 'take off'. The author compares the article to being a VB alternative and that with VB there is not reason for it; I guess the author missed the note that VB is dead.

Haskell is a different story. A language being complex doesn't "kill" a software language. Functional programming in general is just beginning to take off as a whole; and dragging modern OO languages with it. Apparently Google doesn't think Haskell is dead either as they have assigned 9 developers to the language.

Comparing the database protocol?

I started out my professional programming career with a lessor loved language at the time called Delphi. One of the wonderful things about Delphi was that there was plenty of options to choose from to connect to databases: ADO, BDE, midas,DBX and a plethora of others. Each offered their own upsides and downsides but were usually chosen by developer religion or need. However, if the application developer properly abstracted and layered their application it was a simple matter to switch between connectivity options as everything extended from a few base classes such as TDataset.
When I moved to Java, I expected to have to give up this freedom since all database connectivity in Java was done through JDBC; however, I was pleasantly surprised. JDBC was simply a set of a few base classes and standards that were enforced by the vendor. To go one step higher than my beloved Delphi IDE most IDE vendors programmed tools wrapped around the base classes so that one plugin would work with most JDBC protocol vendors.
As time moved on, I sorely missed doing desktop development so I moved to a set of .net/mono development languages. One would expect that ADO.NET would follow along the same methodology of JDBC in providing a few base classes and standards that would be enforced; and at first glance it is. However, it seems almost all tool vendors program to concrete classes/implementations. For example, attempt to use an Informix or Ingress .net provider in the server explorer in the IDE or with the SmartCode code generator; sadly it will not happen. Everything you can possibly need can be pulled from the base classes so it leaves me scratching my head.