sdavies asks: "Functional languages like Scheme and Haskell are great! (here is a PS viewer) They give programmers new tools for elegance and abstraction. Unfortunately, to the legions of procedural programmers writing in languages like C/C++(/C#), Java, and VB, functional languages are considered obscure and impractical. What is your experience with functional languages, and what do you think is preventing them from being adopted into the mainstream?"

For those of you who think Ask Slashdot is lacking in the technical questions department, I hope this query from (yet another) Anonymous Coward will spark your interest: "I have written a forking server in Perl that is exibiting a phase change in its response characteristics around 10 simultaneous connections. As the number of simultaneous connections passes through 10 connections the connection time increases by two orders of magnitude and becomes very random. At the same point the transmission times drop slightly and continue to have small standard deviations. Although I posted this question to a variety of Perl and Unix usenet usegroups over a week ago, I never received a response. Since the most important part of the post is the performance plot, I placed it and relevant code snipits at: http://www.geocities.com/nawkboy The memory, io, and cpu usage never exceeded more than 80% at any time during the tests and were seldom above 50%. The test results were very similar between remote and local clients. The server is running on a Sun Enterprise 420R running Solaris 2.6. I do not understand the behavior and would appreciate any guidance in understanding it."

adagioforstrings asks: "A couple years ago I remember hearing a lot about an open source operating system called Freedows. It used the concept of a cache kernel in order to provide emulation for several operating systems (among them Windows, Linux, MacOS). I was looking at the Web site and there haven't been any updates for nearly a year now. What happened to the project? Too ambitious, or did it just never get enough steam going?" According to the site, it looks like Freedows didn't quite make it out of the specification stage. Is the project still alive? Is it dead? Or is it in suspended animation waiting for the right set of people to reanimate it?

pointym5 asks: "ObjectSpace, home of many well-respected software packages for Java (Voyager, JGL, DXML), has had a much appreciated tradition of providing most tools free for development and even non-redistribution commercial use. While some tools still are distributed that way (for now), the DXML product seems to have been yanked from the "free" list onto the "pay $$$" list. By way of introduction: DXML is a tool that translates an XML DTD into a set of Java classes. There are other tools like it, but this one operated in a way I felt to be most programmer-friendly. In addition, the tool made it possible to leverage the work it did in parsing the DTD so that at run time one could access the meta-data and do wonderful magical things." While I'm sad to see another piece of quality software removed from the ranks, the code belongs to ObjectSpace and is licenced how they wish, though I would be interested in knowing if there were any overriding (non-profit margin related) reasons to this decision.

A huge number of people wrote in to say that FreePascal, the BP 7.0 and Delphi compatible compiler finally has an official release. Check it out at http://www.freepascal.org to get version 1.0.

The growth of processor power notwithstanding, for tasks which can be parallelized, relying on a single processor can be counterproductive. Instead, efforts to distribute computing resources are becoming ever more important. Jayakrishnan brings us this review of JavaSpaces Principles, Patterns and Practices, proof that the tools to accomplish that are steadily becoming accessible to non-PhDs.

axlrosen asks: "Given Microsoft's current prerelease C# spec, would it be possible to write an automatic converter from C# to Java? Are there any parts of the language that couldn't be converted? Could the 'unsafe' stuff be converted to a combination of Java and C++, using JNI?" Of course something like this is possible, but is it practical at this point? C# is a very new language, and I wouldn't advise starting any serious projects with it until the language has been through its paces. If you are considering between C# and Java for a large project, I'd suggest that you use Java, at least until C# has matured a bit.

unicron writes: "PHPBuilder has got an article MySQL and PostgreSQL Compared. " Everyone who has used these DBs knows the differences between them, and now that licensing isn't one of them, let's try to talk about where each excels and the other fails. I know people get almost as religious about their DBs as they do about OSs and programming languages, but let's try to get somewhere here and not just needlessly flame and rant, mmkay?

nodvin asks: "Is there an Open Source alternative to PDF files? In the late 80's and early 90's I was building and distributing documents in a competing format called DigitaPaper by a company called Common Ground. DigitalPaper was a nice format and more cost effective than Adobe Acrobat. Common Ground seems to have lost out to Adobe (marketing muscle can be more important than the capabilities or qualities of competing products) and the company, or at least the product and format, seems to have been acquired by Hummingbird. Hummingbird is no longer providing any support for the product but is still providing the DigitalPaper viewer and there is a free Common Ground Internet Edition. Perhaps Hummingbird could be convinced to Open Source the code to Common Ground as well as the format of DigitalPaper?"

gibson_81 asks: "I'm writing a device driver for a really ugly piece of hardware: it needs me to read in firmware from a file before I can initialize it. For now, I force the user-program to read the entire file into memory and pass that memory buffer as an IOCTL argument, but that's even uglier than the hardware. None of the documents on writing kernel device drivers have mentioned how to access files from the kernel, but some source-grepping led me to sys_open ... which was not exported to modules :( So, I ask you, the Slashdot community: do you know what functions I can use to do this, or is it a no-no?"

frustrated-open-sourcer asks: "We have a product in development and we want to make the APIs, docs, and source public, which is what we've announced, but we have to be able to make money on the end results or we'll just abandon the project. Is there any other way but to be closed or use patents?" I've had a lot of folks ask this question, but this one is by far the best version I've heard, and raises some really good questions.

EricHeinz asks: "Over the past few years I've been hearing about how successful everyone in the booming technology industry is. I even hear about many people getting jobs right out of or during high school. I'm fairly skilled in the ways of both Web design and programming, and I know that many companies are looking for techies. So before going job hunting for the summer, I wanted to know if anybody at Slashdot had experience working for companies during their younger years, and how they dealt with companies with difficulties hiring younger employees?"

spectecjr asks: "The word on the street is that Unicode is the panacea for programming globalizable applications. The thing is, which operating systems support it? And how much work do you need to do? Allegedly, KDE and GNOME both support Unicode. Windows 9x supports it, but in a rather fragmented manner. Windows 2000 is Unicode to the extreme, even supporting Dvengali, Thai and Arabic script on all versions. But what are the pitfalls? What do you have to be aware of? What makes it different than talking to ASCII? How do you handle whitespace? How do you make your API display the characters in the right fonts? All of these issues are becoming more important as the world becomes more switched on, and the boundaries shrink between places. But what does it really mean for Joe Q. Developer?"

PHP Group announced today the availability of the first maintenance release for PHP 4.0. PHP 4.0.1 includes increased performance as well as some bug fixes and new features. The full list can be found here.

lgritz asks: "I've developed almost exclusively on various brands of Unix for the last 12 or so years, but am in an unfortunate predicament where some of my software needs to run under Windows also. I continue to develop mainly under Linux, but need the software to port and I find that my knowledge of Windoze is so sketchy that I spend way too much time screwing around with it. I think this is mainly because I just don't know the equivalent nomenclature and idioms. Does anybody have a good reference (a book, preferably) that's specifically meant to introduce Windows programming to experienced Unix programmers? Something that'll tell me, for example, which VC++ compiler options are roughly equivalent to the things I use under Unix, or what the equivalents to dlopen is, or how to launch another process at the end of a pipe, and so on? I'm looking for roughly the equivalent of Stevens' "Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment," except geared toward showing me the equivalent idioms in Windows-ese."

Snoop Baron writes: "Microsoft has released information about C# on their Visual Studio homepage; the article includes an early version of their C# Language Reference. After having browsed the C# Language Reference PDF I believe they have made some mistakes that Java thankfully avoids. What do you think?"

_wintermute writes "For various reasons, I have been examining M$ COM+ Services under Windows 2000. It all seems rather impressive (which smacks of heresy, obviously). COM+ basically integrates COM with Microsoft's Transaction Server, and handles concurrency & threading, security, transaction management, object pooling, and queuing (very handy for a whole range of Internet services). Everything is integrated into W2K and it all seems to work very well. Which seems too good to be true. I have been grinding away at it for months without even a single failure. I was wondering if similar services exist on other platforms and what they were like? Are there other platforms that capture this much functionality? Do we actually need all this COM+ stuff anyway?"

Another member from the large Clan of Anonymous Coward asks: "I'd like to know people's experience with automatic code documentation packages, such as DOC++ and Kdoc.It seems as if they all have their advantages and disadvantages, without any being particularly 'the best'. If there's another package out there that supports both C and C++ while creating TexInfo and HTML output, that would be great!" Why limit this to just C++, code needs to be documented regardless of the language it's in.

A nameless wonder snuck this query under my door: "As a fairly new developer, with plans to start making software of sufficient quality to share (i.e. a program whose code/distribution I need not be embarrassed of), I am trying to find good, useful information on how to use automake, autoconf, etc. The main pages are wonderful at telling me the command line options, but don't explain what they do and how they work. I have found a good starter in this article on IBM's Developer works, but where can I find more information? Would someone please (pretty please?) write a HOWTO for the LDP? is there a hidden walkthrough/introduction out there on the net that could shed some light on these tools?"

An anonymous reader wrote in to say: "The O'Reilly Network has posted a bunch of articles about OpenGL programming under Linux. There's an introduction to OpenGL, and then two related articles detailing how to create a OpenGL application. They've even included a demo program which is released as PD. Hopefully this will inspire more programmers out there to use OpenGL in their applications."