Room for both Open and Closed Source?

Stuart Cohen writes that the Open Source Model is Broken, and I think a bigger point perhaps needs to be highlighted. Open source software can be great, it can have a wonderful function and it can make life better. But not everything needs to be or should be open source. I read a Wikipedia article that listed “not open source” as a con for a particular piece of software. This type of bias, aside from being a reason to further dislike Wikipedia, is also a symptom of... Read More

Avoiding Loose Typing Dangers

Sometimes I like terse code. if( state ){} is clear. However this syntax can cause a lot of grief in loose typed languages, and while you can avoid some cases by typing vars, you can still get yourself into trouble (as a note: I find strict mode a pain in ActionScript). if( GetState() ){} may mess you up if the function returns a string, where if( GetState() == false ){} will do the type conversion for you and function properly. Tweet Read More