I Am Sent to (Czech) Siberia

As I contemplate an early-January trip to Prague, the European capital known as the birthplace of NetBeans, this Java platform-plus-IDE has been in my thoughts.

The evidence is that I'm not alone. Jonathan Schwartz recently posted a world map of NetBeans downloads on his blog, with the number of downloads represented by color intensity. Looking at that warm magenta glow in Eastern Europe, I could almost forget that it's probably going to be colder than an unexpected icicle down the back of the neck in the Czech Republic in January. A lot colder, I imagine, than India, where DDJ editor-in-chief Jonathan Erickson will be hanging out. The official Website of the Czech Republic brags about an area just a few km south of Prague that is fondly known as "Czech Siberia" for its unusually cold weather.

NetBeans, though, is apparently hot. Not so much as evidence of this fact as in a spirit of "isn't that interesting?", I note that NetBeans author Geertjan's blog discusses how the NetBeans book is being written in NetBeans and also offers some background on the truly interesting NetBeans Lexer API.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to get back to trip preparations: packing my long underwear and reading Kafka.

Posted by Mike Swaine at 04:34 PM  Permalink