My favourite item: Rails is a Ghetto. Rant with a Capital R by ZFSA. Vitriolic and highly entertaining. There might even be a smidgen of truth here and there – i’ll look up Merb (via Peter Van Dijck).
Scala seems to be the Next Language of the moment. Saw a presentation on Scala at Javapolis, and while i was interested, i wasn’t totally blown away. But then that may be too much to expect, i suppose.
Innovation : apparently, the less you know, the better you are at it. It’s also my experience. As a non-expert you come up with seemingly idiotic suggestions which sometimes turn out to be good ideas. People with a mixed background are often interesting, in my opinion.
I tend to follow your point regarding “less (overhead) you know”, the better you are for doing thing. Sometime to validate an idea, a test implementation with Python (“replace it with your favorite language “) is always better than a technical meeting with 10 people around the table.
I agree with you
However, in this case it’s more that an outsider’s/multidisciplinary point of view gives you a fresh perspective, i think.