While I was wondering if using haXe or Java with my server, I’ve stumbled upon some discussion on Static Typing (Java) vs. Dynamic Typing (Ruby, Php).
In a really interesting blog post (read the comments too) I found this touching phrase:

“Static typing is Communist Bureaucracy”.

In short: since we (should) have pervasive testing, Static Typing is only more testing. However, a comment is enlighting:

I’m finding this logic hard to follow. Testing is good, coverage is good. Static typing is, among other things, a way to have the compiler test your code for type issues. Since we like testing, this makes static typing good, right?

But Static Typing not only prevent you to do mistakes, like typos, it allows your IDE to know what you are doing:

Dynamic Static Typing speeds up development because there is physically less to type since ctrl+space and ctrl+2 write the declarations for you.

Its seems obvious to me that Dynamic Typing is worth the catch only for a quick start or for learning.
Since almost all of the dynamically typed languages (like Actionscript, Perl, Php) have migrated to some kind of Static Typing (eg: Type Inference), there should be a reason.

Periodically, a new Dynamically Typed language spawn, attracting junior/tired programmers with the mirage of the simplicity and the less-to-type-ing, riding the hype until his young audience grows and start doing large projects hoping not to call a function with the wrong arguments.

Only then they realize the big truth: Static Typing is just more informations in the source code.
And more information means less wondering-what-object-was or what-was-the-method-name-and-parameters or who-instantiate-this-object, not to mention static analysis.

And hey, they have invented Javadoc-like documentation and Annotations just to add some more information, why remove one of the most important?

Just like the title, incredibly fun.

10 Great Muppet Moments in Muppet History

Flyer is a open source framwork for symbian phones written in python.

From the site:

Flyer is based on the Flash Lite 2.1 integration with Python for S60 and contains the following features:

- Take photos with device camera from Flash Lite
- Take device screenshots from Flash Lite
- Send files over a bluetooth connection from Flash Lite
- Get the contact entries in the default device database
- Text To Speech
- Sound recording and playback

Moreover: 60% of all donations to Flyer Project will be for Brazilian Children

The Javascript’s world is spinning faster in the last times. An interesting framework was beta-released today, called MindFrame, it allows to define complex behaviors directly in the HTML source using a special syntax.
The parser used is Zparse.
You have to see the syntax in the demo to understand how cool it is.
The idea of parsing an [...]

I’ve been always fascinated by the capabilities of Flash, especially in making networked applications (and games) that can run everywhere.
Flash is the only tool that can bring to the maximum audience with the minimum effort a full fledged application/media player/real time network client.
Yes, low-latency, bi-directional, real time messaging. (using XmlSocket connections)
But, even if Flash is [...]

Yes, its really wonderful: fully working Flex 2 components in a 3D enviroment (via Gianfranco Torlone)

Someone ported Markdown formatting to Javascript.
In the page linked, the text is formatted as you type. I wonder if there is a Wordpress plugin that do something like that.

Richar Leggett wrote on his blog that someone seems to have (re)discovered a new AJAX applications vulnerability and published a paper about that.
However, this type of vulnerability is already known:
when you do a request with Javascript you can only do that to the same domain of your script, but this doesn’t apply to [...]

I’ve stumbled upon a good Flash 9/8/7/Javascript speed test.
Its interesting how Flash 7 was somewhat quicker than 8.
Another useful test is this one from Ted Patrick.
I’ve ever wondered if with Flash 9, Firefox was still so much slower than IE: seems not (with Firefox 2 and IE 7).

Finally, Apollo is out:
grab it from the Adobe Lab
To start with it:
Building your first Flex-based Apollo application