Joel Spolsky writes a very interesting essay about why teaching Java in colleges is actually bad for the computer industry (and for the students themselves). I’ve heard the same kind of thing repeated around halls at Microsoft. Almost every team I interview with my camcorder says they can’t find enough C or C++ programmers to get their stuff done. Some on very exciting teams with hundreds of millions of users. Some that, gasp, actually have budget to hire real programmers. And, this isn’t just a US problem. The problem exists at our offices around the world. Every team I talk with says they wish they could hire more hard-core programmers.

Sometimes I post things without having all the data (although I didn’t know it at the time of posting). What’s interesting about shooting off your mouth in public is that your readers can say “hey, you forgot about this.”

Today is one of those times.

Last night the CEO of Attensa, Craig Barnes wrote me and asked me to give Attensa a fair shot in the RSS world. Today he wrote the same thing on his blog.

I owe him an apology and a correction. Here it is: I’m sorry Craig for not knowing what Attensa had announced. I’m downloading Attensa now to see how it compares to other RSS aggregators. One thing I noticed is that he doesn’t have as many clients out there as NewsGator does. Craig says they are working feverishly on that.

Craig says that their backend is more reliable than NewsGator’s. I’m looking forward to testing that. I’ve had problems using NewsGator on my cell phone, for instance (sometimes it’s hard to mark a feed as read) and sometimes feeds I’ve marked as read come back down as unread. Other people have been reporting other problems with NewsGator’s feeds (Shel Israel told me yesterday that it once resubscribed to feeds he had unsubscribed from).

Let the best API win! Thanks to Craig for correcting my ignorance.

Blogging doubled Stormhoek’s wine sales in less than a year, says Hugh Macleod.

Thanks for the compliments Hugh! Actually, it’s not my blog that’s been changing Microsoft. It’s all the more than 2,000 Microsoft bloggers that are changing Microsoft. If I were the intermediary here between you and the folks who build the products it wouldn’t be that big a deal.

It’s the fact that you can tell a Flight Simulator developer what you’d like to see in the next version. Anyone who wears a goofy hat like that is easy to talk to!

Oh, and I found blogging does something else. It lets readers correct my mistakes. More on that in the next post…