1. Perl6
My primary language's next version, a decade in the making. There is enough progress going on in Rakudo and Parrot to make me satisfied that Perl6 is not vaporware. A better OOP support like the one in Moose/Mouse would be top in my wishlist and Larry Wall has promised just that. Here's hoping another couple of decades of Perl.

2. Clojure
Who in their right minds doesn't get excited over a Lisp with batteries included? Clojure may be just be the next big step in Lisp (and many have this view already), mostly for the fact that it is an evolutionary step from Common Lisp and is built on the JVM. The latter matters a great deal because Clojure can access the rock solid libs already built for Java. No more hunting and asdf installs of relatively unknown libs.

3. F#
The first functional programming language from a big player (Microsoft), it is slated to be included with Visual Studio 2010 and with full access to the DotNet framework. Its OCaml at the core but the libs and the Visual Studio integration would matter a lot to the bigger companies wanting to take a look at FP. Having the name of Microsoft surely couldn't hurt.

4. R7RS Scheme
This is more of a standard than a language implementation per se, but it would be interesting to see where the steering committee goes with this one. The R6RS specification was controversial because many thought it was going against the minimalist philosophy of Scheme while the others welcomed the added practicality of it. If the past is anything to go by, the next specification debate would be highly interesting whichever direction is chosen.

5. Java 7
This is more from a "what next" viewpoint rather than any revolutionary concepts being brought in to Java. I personally want to see how the Java platform survives and progresses after the recent turn of events between Sun and Oracle. Would it evolve, would it stagnate, would it become unusable? Well, we'll have to wait and see.

7th May 2009 will always be remembered as the day when 3D Realms, the studio responsible for the Duke Nukem series, was shutdown. This means that the legendary Duke Nukem Forever title development has finally come to a halt after 12 long years of development. It had become a joke in tech communities all over that the game would never be released and this is like a final nail in the coffin.

Snide remarks aside, I still have fond memories of Duke Nukem 3D in the 90s. It created a cult following when it came out and was majorly responsible in taking the genre forward along with Doom and Quake. If there was ever a game where the character has guts, charisma and a wit about him - it was Duke. Sadly, the next title in the series was delayed by so many years that it never saw the light of day. In 1998, 3D Realms switched the core engine from Quake 2 to Unreal and that was the starting of the long, long wait.

Somehow, reading the news about DNF never being developed made me feel a little nostalgic. I wish the game had been completed, just so that the taint of always-in-development goes away. But that hope has also flickered out. Here's to Duke, 3D Realms and Apogee - thanks for all the great gameplay over the years. You will always be remembered, I hope in positive light.

Read the full DNF history at: Shacknews.

I use Perforce from time to time for small hobby projects and if there is one version control system that has impressed me - it is this one. I've used or atleast tried using Subversion, CVS, Component Software RCS, Bazaar, Fossil and Darcs. Out of these I don't think I'm in a position to comment much on CVS, Subversion or Darcs since I've not used them beyond a couple of hours or so.

My experiences with Bazaar were mixed since it worked fine for a long time for me and I usually don't have big repositories, so the oft-repeated criticism of performance was not a problem for me. But after upgrading to a recent released build I found the new GUI they had bundled on the lines of TortoiseSVN and the like was not really release quality (for me atleast) since I kept running into commit issues with it - though they worked smoothly from the command line. I happened to run into Perforce and since their license is liberal for a team of 2 (or less than), and I'm a solitary team of one - why the heck not give it a shot.

And I was blown away by three things - firstly their setup ease-of-use, second the bloat free server and lastly their awesome client UI. Coming from a bad UI experience of bzr, it was a refreshing change to see how P4V (their client UI) worked. It looked polished, something that people thought out, rigorously tested and felt just right. I've never seen a version control system interface that looked so intuitive. All the things in all the right places. If there is one thing the new guns must learn from Perforce, its their commitment to quality. The server code was also pretty responsive and surprisingly bloat free.

Fossil, the new DVCS from the creator of SQLite also promises to be an exciting development. However, I could never really get it running just right according to me. This maybe my fault I admit, however being a small and new project, the docs are sparse. Frustratingly I gave up after a week. Thankfully, Perforce was still running along fine.

Before this starts looking like an advert to you, I *do* have a couple of disappointments with Perforce. Firstly - branching is either not as easy or not as intuitive as I'd like it to be. In a Client-Server model, I found the branching abilities of Subversion to be superior. The second is kinda annoying - if you change the installation folder of Perforce, the new P4V help location still points to the old one, which shows up the HTML help equivalents of 404. If I ever need to look up the help I have to go through the PDF user guide, which is fantastic by the way.

All in all, Perforce is a mighty fine version control system - scalable, stable and intuitive. It would benefit the newer boys in the game to learn from it. Especially with regards to its UI and documentation.

The classic Vi vs Emacs editor war never dies and never grows old. But it has seen some updates and replacements over the years (or is decades more appropriate?). So what does a typical forum/reddit/slashdot post containing these two religions head on look like now-a-days?

Well, the first smart ass would point out that instead of Vi, the defacto contestant from the blue corner is Vim. This poster may also go at length to discuss modal editing and why it rocks. When he has beaten it into your head that if you don't use modes while editing, you're impure and should be led as far away as possible from any machine that has a possibility of performing computation. Replying to this poster, would be an Emacs fanboy. This creature will make you see that if you have any software, other than a bootloader and a minimal kernel which can launch emacs, on your computer - you're just being redundant. Such a creature also may be well trained in a peculiar language he refers to as Lisp or elisp. While he may try to explain why you calling the language Lisp is wrong because it is "a Lisp" and not "Lisp' per se, his explanations would fall on deaf ears (most probably on yours).

Then there is the rebel sonofabitch. When we have perfect symmetry with two competing groups, there will arise a Pico/Nano fan who will claim that he cherishes simplicity. There may be some references to NEdit and Joe but this is a declining trend. Unfortunately, this has been replaced by a growing trend of confused souls recommending Notepad++, PSPad or another similar product despite having little opinion on why are they recommending it in the first place. Its like everyone comes to an editor war to post after listening to Eye of the Tiger by Survivor, all pumped up, blood rushing through fingertips, aching to post an editor nobody has yet in the thread.

Similar to these souls are the puritan nutheads who recommend Elvis, XEmacs, nVi or microEmacs. They all have their reasons and some of them are even good. However in all my years fighting this war the only convincing arguments arose for XEmacs. Other than that, what I usually end up seeing is religious orthodoxy. Finally, there is a chance that you might see an elusive creature called the corporate monkey who is increasingly being spotted in geek territory. This is the only poor sap, who in an editor war would try to slip in his nomination for an IDE like Eclipse, Netbeans, VisualStudio or whatever his corporate overlords have ordered him to use. Be wary of this one, you might just end up waiting 30 seconds to 3 minutes waiting to write a "quick fire" note to yourself.

This post is meant to be tongue in cheek, so take it thus.

My latest addiction is a nice little gem of a game called Little Fighter 2. I've been playing this game almost every day for a couple of months now and don't seem to tire of it. Since its free and runs on even a medium to low end PC, you might wanna check it out yourself.

But what is really interesting is what draws me to this game. Its obviously not its earth shattering graphics (pun intended) nor its original game design, but its retro multi-character beat 'em up arcade style gameplay. You start with a character and in the story mode, you simply go from stage to stage beating up people. In the duel mode, you take on 2-7 players inside a fixed area and you button-mash your brains out.

Since I'm not the only being on the internet smitten with this game, I guess it must be in the blood of the 20-30 year old's right now, who grew up playing games like these. Sure, awesome graphics rule, the greatest soundtrack rocks and a complicated multi-pronged storyline may just be the norm of the day - but somewhere out there lie gems like these, enamoring the hearts of geeks who grew up with this genre. Some call it old-fashioned, I call it classic.

URL - Little Fighter 2