While many tools help automate application testing, human testers are exceptionally well suited to discover certain types of software defects. uTest provides a marketplace of over ten thousand on-demand testers. The company's Doron Reuveni explains the benefits of testing with real users in this interview with Artima.

In this installment I will talk about tail call optimization, performance and the R6RS module system.

Usage logs can provide useful inputs to user interface and web site designs. But all too often, naive interpretations of log data produce poor (or, at least, unsupported) design decisions. Here are a few of my concerns about the question, "What do the logs say?"

An attempt to answer the question - given 1 million lines of code in the repository (i.e. SVN), is there some rule of thumb as to the number of developers we have to keep on staff just to maintain those 1 million lines of code?

Jonas Bonér commenced a series of blog posts on his experience using Scala for a real-world project in the past nine months. The first post discusses the main risks involved in the decision to use Scala, and how his team was able to mitigate those risks.

Yet another introductory installment. However, after a brief discussion of the available Scheme bibliography, I will actually start writing real Scheme code...

In this episode I will talk about Scheme syntax: about the prefix notation and the infamous parenthesis.

If Python's what I want to do, I should write that book about it. Herein I muse about how to create a book relying largely on community input and help.

SqueakNOS is an old idea that has gotten the kiss of life again. You want fast, simple, and OO? Check it out.

The response to arguments about self in Python is "explicit is better than implicit." In a discussion at Pycon Brazil, I realized that we do need self in the body of a method, but being forced to place it in the argument list is redundant. I'm not actually expecting it to change, but I want to try to establish that this isn't a dumb argument.

In this article, Scott Meyers describes a technique that enables the specification of arbitrary combinations of user-defined code features on a per-function basis and that detects violations of feature constraints during compilation.

Scheme is a language with many implementations and with few libraries. In this episode I will discuss the current situation and I will give some useful indication to the Scheme beginner.

This is the first episode of a long running series of articles about Scheme.

Once the boilerplate traditionally associated with the Service Locator Pattern is eliminated, one of the key motivations for Dependency Injection is reduced, if not eliminated. This article, the second of a two part series, looks at the pros and cons of each approach to interacting with services.

Traditional implementations of the Service Locator Pattern result in a large amount of boilerplate code. This article, the first of a two part series, shows that this is not a necessary weakness.

Side-effect free functions, or pure functions, are an important construct in ensuring code reliability and clarity. In a recent blog post, Matthew Podwysock explores the interaction between pure functions and lazy function evaluation, another hallmark feature of functional languages.