I saw jdahlin's post the other day on GObject introspection. I'm glad to see it finally get committed thanks to m. clasen's work.

I was just a bit sad that i wasn't able to have been more active helping out after agitating for it and doing a first incomplete prototype (because of work and stuff, you know how it is?). That's the great thing about open source though.

With respect to the perennial language question: people should definitely be more aware of the fantastic work done on the C++ bindings (gtkmm, etc). (There is still the core platform issue, but regardless, application developers need to be more aware of all the options available to them).

I hate C++ at least 50,000 times as much as the average joe (read back a bit...arg, it's just such a half-assed language wrt what it could have been). But it can be made to work, and it does make a person more productive: for example deriving a new gobject is handled transparently without half-a-ton of boiler plate that always makes one stop and ponder if the usefulness of deriving is worth the pain.

That said, if a person needs to use C++, they should put some time into learning how to avoid the myriad of pitfalls available to them in the language. One good book i read, and recently revisited was John Lakos' book Large-Scale C++ Software Design. It's mostly about things that aren't addressed in other works. The chapters on 'levelization' and cyclic dependencies were very enlightening (for me) -- reading them crystallized a bunch of incipient ideas whose existence i was just beginning to be vaguely aware of.

And of course there's still my favorite (when it's the right tool): Python plus pygtk.

i read the piece in the new york metro about lessig's experience...and, shit, man. just, shit, man. that's all i have to say.

carry on.