This was intended to be the preface chapter of a book that I was planning to write about the BlitzMax programming language. I am no longer sure if this project is ever going to happen; BlitzMax only occupies a very small niche in the language market, and I am not convinced that a mammoth project [...]

After long and exhaustive discussions and an even longer period of frustrating experiments with all kinds of curly braces and toy languages, I’ve spent the last couple of days on some more exhaustive and frustrating experiments.
Wanna hear about how lovely Netbeans 6.1 runs on Apple’s Java 6 implementation? Well, maybe it will suffice to say [...]

The net is full with questions like that, and usually all the kids asking them get the same idiotic answer: C++. Sure. As if they all had the skill set and the will to write their own Quake 5 engine from scratch. As if using the object-oriented abomination of the low-level system language C would [...]