I am a technology "junky" and I suspect that most people who read my blog regularly or read an occasional blog post from a web search are the same. It is not easy to predict which currently used technologies will end up having a huge impact on human society, but it is fun to make educated guesses. As much as I have been enjoying programming in Scala and Clojure (and some Ruby and Java) I doubt that improvements in programming languages and development tools will profoundly impact society, the economy, and quality of life in general. I also don't think that new "gadget technology" will profoundly effect society, with a possible exception being very low cost smart phones in developing countries. As you can tell by the title of this article, my bet is that the semantic features of HTML5 will have a profound effect on society. I have several reasons for this bet: Semantic tags in HTML5 are minimal but sufficient for web analysis software to detect different typ

Just kidding with the title of this post :-) I believe in using the best tools for any given task, but this is not always possible when working with teams where most developers already know one programming language and/or framework. Also, as a consultant I usually favor using which ever tools are already used in the customer's organization. All that said, I find that alternative JVM languages like Clojure, Scala, and JRuby are so much more effective for the projects that I work on that I have a strong preference to not use Java. I find the decision when to use JRuby to generally be easy, using it on projects requiring fast development, web services, and as glue code for existing Java software. Increasingly though, I am viewing Scala and Clojure to be almost as agile as JRuby, with much better runtime performance. For me, the tough decision is between Scala and Clojure. Taking Martin Odersky's Functional Programming with Scala class definitely affects my decision because I

I am just finishing up today my course work for Andrew Ng's excellent Coursera course in Machine Learning. I am also taking two other classes that I will complete in about a month: Martin Odersky's Functional Programming with Scala class and Geoffrey Hinton's Neural Networks for Machine Learning. Previously this year I also took Natural Language Processing and Software Engineering for SaaS. I have taken the first two or three weeks of several other classes just to get a general feel for their subjects. This morning in one of the last lectures in Andrew Ng's class he showed a precise algorithm for a problem that a customer (a media company in China) and I tried to solve about 7 years ago. We were successful enough to meet my customer's requirements but the next time I see a problem like that (involving collaborative filtering) I will nail the implementation. Every class that I have taken this year has provided many new insights, often on subjects that I thought tha