Kent M. Pitman has been programming in Scheme and Lisp, and contributing to the design of those languages, for a long time -- 24 years. He was a technical contributor and an international representative for the ANSI subcommittee that standardized Common Lisp, and in that capacity directed the design of Lisp's error system. Scheme may be better known as a teaching language, but both Scheme and Lisp have applications (as any Emacs user knows) that go far beyond this. Now's your chance to ask him about the pros and cons of those two languages, circa 2001 A.D. Kent also has an interesting, ambivalent take on Free software that's worth noting in an atmosphere where complex issues are often oversimplified and radicalized. Since he's someone who's helped develop standards, this is perhaps a timely issue on which to probe his opinion. It's also a good time to get acquainted with things he's written, which might interest you just as much as his programming. (Soap opera parodies, anyone?) So suggest questions for Kent below (please, one per post) -- we'll pass along the highest-rated ones for him to answer, and Kent will get back soon with his answers.

txsable asks: "I'm trying to find out if there is a GPL-style Open-source license available with a special twist: that any modifications made, while being allowed to be released as per the terms of the 'normal' GPL, must also be submitted back to the original author for possible inclusion in the main project. I know it seems ridiculous to require by license what should be a common-sense procedure for open-source developers, but I've seen enough projects which were greatly modified from the original project, with features the original project either was working on or had also developed, and it led to confusion and/or unnecessary duplication of effort. Anyone have any suggestions for me (other than writing my own license...I don't speak enough lawyer to make something that reads as bad as a legal document)?"

Whoops. A nasty bug affecting symlinks made it into 2.4.11, and Linus has ditched that "sorry excuse for a kernel" in favor of the new and improved 2.4.12. :) See the (short) changelog or list of mirrors, as usual.

bobm asks: "We've been asked to migrate our newer applications to Unicode. My biggest issue is that if we start storing user data in unicode we will no longer be able to provide complete updates the legacy (pure ASCII) systems. This is important in that we are currently updating > 25k customers a day and managment does not want that to be affected. I also haven't found a clean way to provide multilanguage data mining that can return a single language output. This doesn't even begin to address issues like data validation and display issues. (note: we currently handle the web pages in multiple language sets but require the data to be in ascii form.) I've spent some time on Unicode.Org but I really haven't found any real world discussions on people doing this on a large scale (>1Tbyte databases)."

fuze writes: "It's basically a way for Java developers to migrate their Java apps to .NET.... even provide a 'convenient' migration tool... check it out on MSDN." News.com has a story describing Microsoft's plans to suck Java into .Net, and some commentary saying basically, "No one will use it".

Meltr writes: "This ZDNET article details some of the coming changes to the MySQL database server. In 4.0, to be released in mid-October: 'support for the Unicode character set, the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) protocol, embedded database links and multitable updates' and in 4.1, to be released in December: 'nested queries and stored procedures'."

stygian writes: "Linux 2.4.11...need I say more?" Of course you do. You need to point people to the mirrors and changelog, at a minimum.

Jarito writes: "Seems Kurt has found time to release another version of AtheOS. Changes include a slew of bug/speed fixes for ABrowse, optimization of the TCP/IP stack, a new system for handling POSIX packages, mouse-wheel support, a regular expression searching class and many more. Stop on by www.atheos.cx and check it out." Here's the changelog since 0.3.6 -- AtheOS remains astoundingly slick-looking for a (mostly) one-man project, if you missed our interview with Kurt Skauen, it's worth reading if AtheOS interests you.

Dre writes: "Just a few weeks after the release of the rock-solid KDE 2.2.1, the KDE Project today announced the release of KDE 3.0 Alpha1. Targeted at developers who want to get a head start on porting or writing applications to KDE 3, the release is pretty much a straight port of the KDE 2.2 branch to Qt 3. However, for developers this brings an impressive array of new features to KDE, including new database classes, new data-aware widgets, improved RAD development with a much-enhanced Qt Designer, a new powerful regular expression class (with full Unicode support), improved internationalization support (including the ability to mix different character sets in the same text), bi-directional language support (for languages such as Arabic and Hebrew), multi-monitor (Xinerama and multi-screen) support, better integration of pure Qt applications into KDE, and hardware-accelerated alpha blending. With the Qt port out of the way, the KDE developers can now focus on the planned KDE improvements. Read the full announcement here, or go straight to the source (alternative link)."

Lurks asks: "My company, Codeplay, is set up to develop new and innovative compiler technology for the games industry. Our C compiler, VectorC, is a cutting edge vectorizing compiler aimed at games and multimedia applications that demand high performance generally through hand-optimized assembly. I'm writing to ask the burning question on our minds, is it worth porting VectorC to Linux? In fact, we're already targeting Linux as part of the PlayStation 2 version albeit not generating x86 code of course. A Linux port would see us converge this work with our Win32 compiler and such an undertaking would certainly be popular with our Linux loving techies! One caveat worth mentioning now is that the current version of VectorC is plain C only. 2.0 with full C++ compatibility is due early next year."

chromatic writes "On the heels of Larry's most recent revelation, the mad scientist of Perl (Damian Conway) has followed up with Exegesis 3. His article gives working Perl 6 code examples of Larry's design decisions." Lots of good stuff in here.

andy@petdance.com asks: "Any programmer who's used an online programming resource or community has had the frustration of answering programming questions for non-programmers. This is especially true with web-centric technologies like Perl and PHP. I've always wondered where to point these newest of the new, and O'Reilly's latest Ask Tim article addresses this. Unfortunately, Tim suggests picking up an ORA book on ActionScript, which seems a bit too specific. Are there any good introductions to the concepts of programming? And is any such book necessarily tied to a language?"

Milo_Mindbender asks: "I'm working on a rather large scale C++ graphics/networking project under Linux and am really missing having a low level code profiler like Intel's VTUNE available. In particular, I am looking for the ability to profile not just CPU use, but using the CPU performance counters to profile stuff like L1/L2 cache misses, pipeline stalls...etc. The other VTUNE capability I'm missing is the way it profiles the whole system, so the profile includes time spent in drivers, OS and everything else along with your program's profile. Has anyone seen anything like this for Linux? I hear Intel is working on VTUNE for Linux but they don't seem to have released anything yet."

Eugenia writes: "So, you think that BeOS or AtheOS are niche Operating Systems? Well, you haven't seen anything yet. OSNews provides a list and short description of the most active and most promising Operating Systems written by individuals or small teams just for the fun of it or because they have a dream of how the perfect OS should be (is there such a thing though?). Some of them, like SkyOS for example, are even quite far down the line in terms of usability and advancements."

mccormi writes "The Perl Journal is back. It's been rolled into Sys Admin Magazine as a quarterly supplement for the print publication. On the web side, the archive articles are all up now here. See articles from Vol 1 Issue 1 on regex by Tom Christiansen and cgi programming by Lincoln Stein" I'll take it any way I can get it. TPJ was one of just 5 publications I subscribe to (and 2 of them are comic books so I don't think that counts ;)

rob_99 writes: "The third installment of the Apocalypse is out!" You may have missed the first or second Apocalypses. This one is roughly "all about operators".

SeaBait writes: "This revealing article about the High-performance programming techniques on Linux and Windows shows that Linux rules. The performance testing was on Pipes(interprocess communication mechanism available on both Windows and Linux and UNIX). Although I new Linux would fare the best, the poor performance of Windows XP was a surprise. Windows 2000 actually did better than XP!"

Reader Luke Tymowski gets the credit for this review of another O'Reilly book, one whose subject probably would be useful to more people than books on any single programming language. The book is Managing Mailing Lists -- read on to see how Luke thinks this book stacks up even a few years after its release.

Rudolf writes: "The 16th International Obfuscated C Code Contest is open from now until 01 Dec 2001 23:59:59 UTC. Details are at the IOCCC web site. From the front page, the contest goals are: -- To write the most Obscure/Obfuscated C program (within contest rules -- To show the importance of programming style, in an ironic way. -- To stress C compilers with unusual code. -- To illustrate some of the subtleties of the C language. -- To provide a safe forum for poor C code. :-)"

rfsayre asks: "My employer has been looking into bug tracking options for use with Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, and while I don't have the authority or the resolve to encourage migration from the various MS tools that are in use, I would like to see an Open Source bug tracking system used, instead of Visual Intercept from Elsinore Technologies. Mainly I'm concerned that my employer will try to go as cheap as possible, and I think providing access to everyone from developers to QA interns could get expensive. Of course, what good is bug tracking if not everyone has access to it? So please, show me some Open Source alternatives that talk to SourceSafe, preferably with web based access."