Java8 Lambda Expressions – Perhaps not as sexy as intended?
Edit: Updated the lambda syntax to match that which is found in Brian Goetz’s November 17th presentation at Devoxx In my defence of Java, one of the features I looked forward to in Java8 was the introduction of Lambda expressions. However, a lot of people are dissing the new feature as being “watered down”, or a “poor man’s lambda expressions”. To understand why, it may help to see how Lambdas are used and implemented in a language like Scala and then contrast this to Java8′s Project Lambda adoption. How Lambdas work in Scala Scala gives you a nice...
Read MoreJava is not the new COBOL
If you Google “Java is the new COBOL” you’ll find a glut of articles proliferating this mantra. I don’t know its origins, however I’m inclined to think it’s mostly repeated (and believed) by the Ruby community. Ruby, from a developer’s perspective is a low-friction language. A developer can just sit down at a text editor and start banging out code without really thinking about such superflous things as types. Java on the other hand, well, you have to think a lot about types. Java is a statically typed language after all, and it makes the developer do...
Read MoreWhat’s in a Scala For Comprehension?
When I first started learning Scala the “For Comprehension” threw me for a bit of a loop (pun intended). On the surface it just seems like your every day for-each statement, however it does much more than that. A For Comprehension not only offers the ability to iterate over something like a List, it also provides filtering options and the ability to generate new Lists1. Not just looping… For Comprehensions are able to actually “yield” results if so desired. For example: val sqlStatements = List[String]("select * from...", "selec...") val resultSets = for (sql...
Read MoreLearning Scala? Learn the Fundamentals First
A few weeks back I gave my talk at JavaOne 2011 titled “The Scala Language Tour”, if you’re at all interested you can grab the slides and examples from github. The session was very well received, my only enemy was time! Given 1 hour, how does one give 170+ people a taste of all that’s Scala without completely starving them of details? Lots and lots and lots of dry-runs of your presentation, that’s how. I must have iterated my talk a dozen or more times. I just couldn’t bring myself to trimming any more fat. The short story is, I could have used 5-10 more...
Read MoreFunctionally Inept Developer Survival Guide
The functionally inept developer will typically work hard and produce artifacts that satisfy the outward facing requirements set forth on the project plan. What the Project Manager doesn't understand is that the quality of code being produced is not robust, doesn't stand the test of time...
Read MoreFirst!
You know, I’ve had this domain for about 11 years now and have never put up a blog, but dammit, I’m getting so good at setting up wordpress that it’s really a no brainer for me to do so. I used to blog a long time ago over at JRoller and I do have The Basement Coders Podcast blog, however this domain seems to be the logical place for me to Blog as it’s just for me. Back when I was attending university in the late ’90s we used to call Blogs “.plans”. Why? Because within your Unix home directory you could place a file named “.plan”...
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