prototyping

I have been mulling over writing a peak fitting library for a while. I know Python fairly well and plan on implementing everything in Python to begin with but envisage that I may have to re-implement some core routines in a compiled language eventually. IIRC, one of Python's original remits was as a prototyping language, however Python is pretty liberal in allowing functions, functors, objects to be passed to functions and methods, whereas I suspect the same is not true of say C or Fortran. What should I know about designing functions/classes which I envisage will have to interface into the

The question should be interpreted from a general point of view and not targeted solely at web apps or desktop apps. I have been looking around to find a simple and easy way of creating interactive prototypes for web applications. I'd like to use a technique that allows simple UI creation and especially UI recreation and modification in further iterations. Filling the UI with mockup data should be very simple. The technique may require a simple form of programming, e.g. to specify a drag and drop behaviour from UI element A to UI element B. One tool i currently use is the Adobe Flex Builder.

I'm writing simple database driven application, 80% of functionality is CRUD operations on about 15 tables. Coming from web development background I figured I can cover almost all of these CRUD cases with Rails scaffolding or say Django admins. So I started to look around for Rails/Django-like framework but for Windows Forms applications (ofcourse I understand that "rich client" application development significantly differs from a web development and I'm not expecting anything really similar). I was surprised that except for a variety of ORMs (let's call it Model-layer) it seems like I'm left

Can someone tell me what Strong typing and weak typing means and which one is better? That'll be the theory answers taken care of, but the practice side seems to have been neglected... Strong-typing means that you can't use one type of variable where another is expected (or have restrictions to doing so). Weak-typing means you can mix different types. In PHP for example, you can mix numbers and strings and PHP won't complain because it is a weakly-typed language. $message = "You are visitor number ".$count; If it was strongly typed, you'd have to convert $count from an integer to a string,

I'm about to produce a prototype for a technology startup that I've just joined, and I'm trying to decide which language to use. It's going to be a simple web tool with a MySQL database in the background and some AI stuff going on in between. I've used Ruby and PHP a reasonable amount in the past, but wonder whether I might be better off going with Python or even Perl. My main programming experience is with C / C++ / Java, but I feel like I want to go for something that will make my life as easy as possible since I'm just developing a prototype. I guess what I'm looking for is: speed of

I have added a simple .js file to my page that has some pretty mundane common-task sort of functions added to the Object and Array prototypes. Through trial and error, I've figured out that adding any function to Object.prototype , no matter it's name or what it does causes Javascript errors in jQuery: The culprit? Object.prototype.foo = function() { /*do nothing and break jQuery*/ }; The error I'm getting line 1056 of jquery-1.3.2.js , in the attr:function { } declaration: /*Object doesn't support this property or method*/ name = name.replace(/-([a-z])/ig, function(all, letter) { return