Rob Pike on concurrency

Watch this great Google talk with Rob Pike. He talks about concurrent processes and message passing in the context of Newsqueak – a programming language that he wrote 20 years ago. What he describes is very similar to the Erlang programming model except that channels are first class citizens.

Java Puzzlers

Go directly to here if you think you know all the dark corners of the Java language and APIs. It’s a really worthwhile Google TechTalk. You will come away thinking that you had better set up automated FindBugs analysis of your code!

First steps to Scala

If you’re interested in the Scala programming language then this article will come in handy. I learned a couple of things. In particular, I didn’t realise that you could instantiate an object with a trait (effectively changing the trait from the one specified in the class definition). Very interested in how that is implemented.

More praise for Wicket

Wicket has finally graduated to become a top level Apache project and is receiving a much praise as ever.

MacTax – Mac prices in the UK

I would really like to try a Mac as my next computer. I’ve been meaning to ever since they went UNIX . Haven’t decided yet between a MacBook, MacBook Pro or iMac. However, I keep coming back to the pricing … particularly here the UK and I hear it’s the same throughout Europe.

A basic spec 15″ MacBook Pro is £1,300 in the UK and only $2,000 in the US…
Almost 600USD more expensive

The standard iMac 24″ is £1,350 in the UK and only $2,000 in the US…
Almost 700USD more expensive

Where does the MacTax go?

Exceptions – checked or not?

The Java Posse #127 podcast talks about the possibility of removing checked exceptions from the Java language. The JavaPosse folks seem to universally like them. No one knew what Scala did with respect to checked exceptions. Turns out that it does not have them!

3.3. Why are there no throws annotations on methods, unlike in Java?

Compile-time checking of exceptions sounds good in theory, but in practice has not worked well. Programmers tend to write catch clauses that catch too many exceptions, thus swallowing exceptions and decreasing reliability.

If you haven’t seen the Scala language yet, check Martin Odersky’s Google Techtalk.

I tend to avoid checked exceptions. This is the way that the Spring folks have gone and – of course – Anders Hejlsberg. Anders did a great job designing the C# language.

I’m still digging into an article on dev2dev which promotes checked exceptions and points out that that the times they get annoying is where the Java API was poorly designed. For me this still points that checked exceptions are a experimental language feature perhaps best left out of industry programming languages for now.

DSCM: Mercurial or Bazaar?

I just recently switched over to using Mercurial for all SCM needs. I figured that the Mercurial team had solved the rename problem by now. However, I just noticed Mark Shuttleworth’s entry on the topic. It seems Bazaar could still be in the running as the DSCM of choice. However with Sun choosing it for OpenSolaris and now OpenJDK it kinda becomes inevitable for Java developer to go with Mercurial. After all, Mercurial has Eclipse and Netbeans plugins. But then again, I love to restructure my tree… Then again I don’t merge with anyone right now .

Why MoinMoin chose Mercurial

Why OpenSolaris chose Mercurial (GIT and Bazaar being the other finalists)

Why Mozilla chose Mercurial – Bazaar and Mercurial were the final 2

On the whole, it seems that GIT lacks the win32 support and is a bit weird in that it doesn’t explicit track renames and guesses about them. Bazaar has some performance issues but otherwise is a good candidate. Mercurial does copy+delete renames but otherwise has great performance, portability and usability.

I’m happy with my choice of Mercurial but Bazaar will be the one to watch as they work towards 1.0 focusing on performance and documentation improvements.

Closures for Java

Just watched Neal Gafter’s Google tech talk about closures again. I really hope that the community gets behind this proposal. Let’s do it right rather than opting for any “pragmatic” solution that amount to a concise syntax for anonymous classes. Gafter’s proposed will allow the “language” to change between updates to the Java Language Specification. This will allow more experimentation and innovation. I encourage you to watch the video for the details. Additional information can be gleaned from the JavaPolis interview.

There has appeared a consensus proposal on the javac.info site. It does appear that Bob Lee (Crazy Bob) has been turned around. I hope the consensus is not a compromise on the original proposal’s intent.

GWT not just for SPAs!

Bruce Johnson busts the myth that Google Web Toolkit is only for single page applications – amongst other things – in the video presentation available from InfoQ.

WiFi or WiFry?

Starting to hear worrying reports about the heath dangers of WiFi radiation. I certainly hope it’s unfounded as I am not sure what I’d do without always on, wireless broadband!