I've heard 'piquant' (from French) being used for spicy in the red pepper sense. It sounds pretentious but maybe it'll be more mainstream some day.

I think he means the APIs that allow you to simulate mouseclicks and keyboard input on arbitrary windows and controls

That's what I meant to use it for but the API is used at the root of applications to draw windows, handle mouse click events, accept keyboard input, create icons in the system tray and anything else that would involve Windows UI.

In the same way applications use the win API to create their UI, others could use it to manipulate and control the interface of other programs. It's powerful.

You might be interested in GNU Unifont: http://unifoundry.com/unifont.html

Or some of these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software_Unicode_typefaces

I was very surprised he said Basic.

Of course, he presume he doesn't do much hard core software engineering anymore, but I assumed that family was pretty much a thing of the past (and legacy code).

Gates founded Microsoft to sell a Basic interpreter. His company spent a lot of time keeping Basic as a core part of its line up long after it was considered passé. I suspect that Gates has some nostalgia for it.

Yeah, Microsoft really is the "BASIC company". From the early 8bit machines (did you know the Commodore 64 BASIC ROM is (c) Microsoft?) through qbasic and all the way up to visual basic and VBA...

Not just the Commodore; the Apple II, TRS-80, and MSX all used Microsoft's BASIC in one form or another. It shouldn't be any surprise at all that their dev tools continue to be rather well done (regardless of what you think of the platform they're on)

VB.Net is a completely different beast from older Visual Basic (up to VB6). It's still under active development as a first-class citizen on MS's .Net stack. It has iterators, generics, partial classes, anonymous types, lambdas, and other stuff you wouldn't expect to find in a BASIC.

Gates has a long history with BASIC. It would, IMO, stand to reason that he would keep his hand in.

There is "Small Basic" which is a bit more capable than the QBASIC of yore.

http://smallbasic.com/about.aspx

I'm pretty sure he meant VB. I don't think anybody programs in pure QBasic anymore.

Forgive my ignorance, but what is wrong with static class members?

I don't know any theoretical explanation, but I try explain it.

You see static String.Split and normal method Split of String objects.

First method does not belong to string objects, it belongs to String class.

String class is an object itself, so why not make this distinction more explicit?

It exactly so in Scala: classes are classes and all static members goes to companion objects. Companion objects by nature are singletones.

I think it's much more natural this way than in C++/Java/C#. Everything on its place, even singletones became elegant.

I recently followed a Computer Networking course, and the teachers actually went though pains to ensure those with older editions could follow the assigned exercises.

From what I could tell, the differences between the 6th, 5th and 4th editions were not discernible in the text, only the exercises had changed positions and had subtle variations in the numbers and wordings. That was my first experience with the textbook industry. The book, Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach by Kurose and Ross was very good, but the obvious abuse of their monopoly by forcing students to buy the newer editions gave me my first look into how the textbook industry operates.

Still, I have great respect for my University (Utrecht University in the Netherlands) for (until now) either using syllabi that can be freely downloaded or cheaply bought for a hardcopy or accommodating students with older editions of textbooks.

EDIT: Oh, and I recently found this link: http://www.textbooknova.com/.

It's probably not legal, but free textbooks!

Or select the picture and copy it to the desktop.

    try:
       f = float(someText)
    catch ValueError:
       # I just parsed you, this is crazy,
       # here's an exception, throw it maybe?

Formatted That For You

It's not invisible when you're actually looking for an invisible file.

That seems like a bad idea. TeX doesn't allow separation between markup and presentation very well. Something like DocBook[1] with a presentation engine like XSLT might be better, if it wasn't for the verbosity of the XML source.

[1] http://www.docbook.org/whatis

+1.

Any representation that makes people think "this is a paragraph", "this is a title", "this is a list" and then apply styles to each is an improvement over the current "lets vomit text on a page, then tweak individual sections independently" method endorsed by most word processors.

Tools that do this like (Pandoc being the one I like) do a great job of getting people to think of documents as text that gets styled later.