My understanding is that Microsoft are cashed up in this economic crisis. Plus they’ve even hired Neal Gafter. Microsoft hire a lot of very good guys. With Gafter over at Microsoft, I wonder if that influenced the decision to squash closures for Java… That was the dumbest move for Java. I suppose it doesn’t really matter: for me, Scala is the next Java.

I wonder if businesses will be more likely to adopt .NET rather than Java now though and really turn the tide. This global recession is turning out to be what I call The Greater Depression, some The Second Great Depression and still some other young ‘uns The Great Depression 2.0. I wonder who will come out on top? With ReSharper, Visual Studio is actually pretty good! So, no excuses – go brush up those C# skills!

An updated public draft is now available. Other useful information – particularly the introductory guide – can be found on the Seam Framework wiki.

The specification draws much from Seam and Guice and consequently Gavin King and Bob Lee. Congratulations to all involved in the specification. It’s really worth looking at particularly if you haven’t been using Seam 2 or Guice 2. I find myself particularly drawn to Guice 2. I hope they release it soon .

So what are monads? Well it appears to be an “ultimate interface” with 3 special methods – return (also called unit), bind and join (where join can be derived from return and bind). My current understanding is that monads are the “ultimate iterator” but I figured I’m supposed to understand that they are an “abstraction over computation”. This is going to take a while to sink in. Here are the signatures for the 3 special methods:

return: a -> Ma
bind: M a -> (a -> M b) -> M b
join: M (M a) -> M a


In terms of List, return is cons, bind is flatMap and join is flatten. I wasn’t familiar with flatMap but it’s a more general version of map. Map can be implemented in terms of bind/flatMap and unit/cons.

List(1, 2, 3) map (n => n + 1)
List(1, 2, 3) flatMap (n => List(n + 1))


Since then I’ve been learning a little more about Haskell and Category Theory. It’s really great to have a new avenue of things to study. Haskell certainly has come a long way since I looked at it last.

Oh and the title of this post… Well it’s kind of a bad joke from day 3. After 3 days of indoctrination I realised that it was leading to the conclusion that a new breed of programmer was required – the hyper-productive monadic programmer for the 21st century. This new breed of programmer would eschew side effects and even OOP in preference to algebraic data types, type classes, implicits, higher order functions, monads and higher kinds. They would impress their friends with deep knowledge of mathematical principles and have an IQ 50 points above decent developers of today. These programmers would be trained to be 10x more productive than their imperative colleagues (coding in Java and C#) – allowing some of us to retire for a better life (perhaps as an economist or financial advisor). All that remains is to work out how much of this is hyperbole and how much sound.

• Less people needed to reach a consensus about interfaces between layers of the application.
• It helps to give you the big picture of the application which is something that most of us developers strive to see.

Ext JS 2.0.2 is still available for download under a LGPL licence and can be used with the GWT integration found in the GWT-Ext project (not to be confused with Ext GWT). i.e. GWT-Ext 2.0.3 and Ext 2.0.2 are still both LGPL. I wonder if Ext GWT 1.0 (GPL) started life as GWT-Ext 2.0.3 (LGPL)…

I wonder if a fork will appear… or perhaps a Yahoo! UI on GWT or a Tibco GI on GWT. Both YUI and GI are BSD and so very business friendly.

I discovered a promise of a tibcogi4gwt project but nothing more

Update: more info can be found in a post by the author of GWT-Ext.

Note that there seems to be only one level to the game which isn’t entirely implemented. It’s the concept that such a beast can be implemented in JavaScript rather than Flash that’s interesting.