Software, Business, and Life
May 11 2008
Historically I have not been a fan of “frameworks”, and I have often repeated the following joke: What’s the difference between an application and a framework? An application is something a customer actually wants! However, for some applications, I recommend use of an application framework. For some Oasis Digital projects, I require it: Please, Use [...]
Jan 14 2008
A few months ago Alex Miller pointed me to this Delphi doom article (the site appears to be down at the moment), which reminded me to post about the same topic. Here goes. Delphi shipped in 1995, and its demise has been declared frequently since 1997 or so. In a sense this demise is true, [...]
Jan 13 2008
Last year I posted about the use of a Joe Celko-style nested set hierarchy representation, for fast hierarchy queries. Here I will describe another approach which is simpler to query, but more wasteful of space. I did not invent this transitive closure approach, I learned of it from several directions: Celko wrote about it as [...]
Oct 16 2007
This is an oldie-but-goodie: Guy Steele’s “Growing a Language” talk from OOPSLA 1998. It is amazing to me that Guy, whose is something of a legend in language design, and who thinks so clearly about what makes a good language, was also key in designing Java. Java has been extremely slow to grow in the [...]
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Jun 27 2007
There’s a lot of buzz about Steve Yegge’s “port” of Rails to JavaScript, and Steve has now provided (in his funny, self-deprecating style) the background of how it came to be. He doesn’t quite say it explicitly in this post, but I think it reveals that the “Next Big Language” he has been hinting at [...]
May 26 2007
The Java software development kit documentation can be downloaded from java.sun.com, in the form of a ZIP file with tens of thousands of linked HTML file. This seems like an ideal canonical form for this documentation, but it is inconvenient to use, and inconvenient to have so many files sitting around. If your development machine [...]
