[Edit: For anyone reading this, Glasgow is a great place, sure it has difficult neighborhoods, but most cities do and most cities don't have nearly as much character as Glasgow.]
Seconded: Glasgow also has some of the most amazing architecture, especially in the Park area [1].
I think a lot of the talk about the rough side of Glasgow has been overblown. Every city has rough areas and dodgy people. There are parts of London it's inadvisable to go out in after dark, in fact I've lived in some.
One of my all time favorite bits of software was written in Glasgow at the Turing Institute by Arthur van Hoff (later of the original Sun Java team and one of the founders of Marimba). It was a lovely user interface builder created on top of Sun's PostScript-based NeWS graphical environment: HyperNeWS.
One of the strengths/weaknesses of HyperNeWS was that it relied on PostScript scripting - which was perhaps a bit tricky for us mere mortals. So Arthur wrote an ANSI C to PostScript compiler (in PostScript) - one of his Glaswegian colleages named this PDB, which stood, of course, for Pure Dead Brilliant.
Hey that's one of my favorite pieces of software too! I moved to Glasgow to work on it with Arthur. The Glasgow School of Art rocks on Friday nights! ;) And you are correct about PdB's true meaning.
I've smiled at many a piece of HN serendipity in the past, but never expected it to happen to me. I wrote this car park post, and also DJ'd at the arty last friday night. Perfection.
I knew sitting here in Edinburgh and writing nice things about Glasgow would pay off... :-)
Actually, I seem to remember that I owe you some thanks, I blagged a very early copy of Java from you in early '95 - which led to some fairly interesting stuff (at least for Scotland).
