via @textfiles "Mark Pilgrim is alive/annoyed we called the police. Please stand down and give the man privacy and space, and thanks everyone for caring."
Lots of people say that in all sorts of situations, but it never seems to me that it ever helps. It seems that lawyers always make things more adversarial, they extract money whether they make things better or not, and there's rarely, if ever, any way to change your mind once you've got them in.
When I was a part of a semi-hostile management buyout the lawyers only ever made it worse. Things were rescued more than once by talking directly with the other parties despite the lawyers' advice.
But if it seems irrecoverable, usually I'd rather just walk away. YMMV.
Knowing that "if he doesn't give in, I'll take him to court and take everything he owns" can be a real advantage in negotiations. For that matter, "she's totally within her rights" or "that clause is not enforceable" are good to know too.
This is more about a BATNA than about letting lawyers negotiate for you, though.
I love Scala, but it's tools at this point in time don't lend itself to be an easily adopted new language (unless you're keen on getting your hands dirty setting up the right dev. environment). I use Java for work, and have dabbled in PHP, but I think for learning a new language for a web project, you should give Ruby On Rails a go.
Following up on my reply, this post by the author of the language (on an unrelated forum) might illuminate the issue you were concerned with:
"Hi,
I'm the author of the Cobra programming language. I didn't write the
statement about it being intrinsically bound up in the .NET framework.
In fact, I'm the guy who started two additional back-ends for JVM and
Objective-C, as well as the refactoring necessary to support this.
These are not complete, and I would love any and all help with these
efforts. If you're interested, let me know. (Cobra is open source
under the liberal MIT license.)
In the mean time, Cobra runs on Novell Mono (which I use on Mac and
Linux) and Microsoft .NET.
You can learn more about Cobra at http://cobra-language.com/
-Chuck "
Hosting on .NET has given the author access to some very useful facilities. A VM that understands generics, with two major independent implementations, and a large ecosystem of code and tools.
But for many open source programmers, anything to do with Microsoft, even at arm's length, is seen as suspect. This is a cultural memory that can't easily be erased.
Hence my original remark: good language, but it will struggle to gain traction.
My (vague) guess would be that with the existence of Mono, which essentially gives something like this a universality, whomever down voted you thought you might have been MS bashing.
But yeah, I don't think your comment was out of line.
