Peter Coffee wrote an interesting column for eWeek today. It describes a completely bogus patent application submitted by the Visual Basic team at Microsoft. I completely agree with Coffee's assessment of the situation. This is absurd (and I hold five patents myself).

Interestingly, Coffee mentions Lisp, which he has a couple of times before in other columns. I wrote to him and asked whether he was a closet Lispnik and he replied,

Not "closet," I assure you. My proclivities for Lisp, Ada, and Java as languages in which I can actually think about the problem -- rather than the language -- are not meant to be secret in any way.

I'm a recovering Java programmer, myself, and have never touched Ada, but it's nice to know that people wielding the power of the pen have a soft spot for Lisp.

I also firmly believe in Coffee's last point, that service businesses must automate in order to go through any business transformation. My current company, Inkra Networks, is providing a virtualized network infrastructure solution that allows service automation on top of it.