A couple of weeks ago, I sent out a little quiz to my readers of The Java Specialists' Newsletter. No one managed to figure out what the code does without running it. Some managed to explain the result once they had run it. Perfect quiz for weeding out those job applicants you don't like. Especially in the banking industry. Enough hints :-)

My friend James Ward was explaining some of the struggles he had learning Scala, in particular partial functions.

Over a career, good programmers spend much more of their time in professional education than in their college classes. Much of this professional training is tied up with certification programs.

My JavaOne day three was just sessions. And the concert! But the sessions were good ones.

Accusoft Pegasus announces the acquisition of Adeptol, a leader in document viewing technology, and substantially all of its assets.

Day Two at JavaOne brought a few more interesting announcements.

The day one keynote convinced everyone that Java is moving forward. There are good things happening, good things on the horizon, and a few surprise changes-in-direction from Oracle.

Following up on my previous article, I create a super-simple example where a web page communicates with the server (written in Web.py) sending a JSON request object and receiving a JSON object as a response, which it uses to dynamically update the page. Afterwards, James Ward quickly loads the example into Heroku using their new Python support.

My thoughts on the battle between dynamic languages and those with Turing complete type systems after attending StrangeLoop.

In my article on JavaScript, I observed that we need a new language that generates good and safe JavaScript, so that you no longer have to think about either JavaScript issues or cross-browser problems. Little did I know that the solution(s) had already appeared in the form of JQuery and CoffeeScript.

One of the things I've loved about Python is that it was built as a community from the beginning. Language design decisions are genuinely discussed and struggled with as a community. But with Java, I've always felt like the adults were telling me what to think.

It appears we are stuck with JavaScript, at least in the near-to-mid term. Although the language is an abomination, some things are getting better. I discovered a couple of great lectures and a book that might change your perspective (a little) about the language.

Borachio is a mock object library for Scala that supports both mock objects and mock functions.

Sean Landis, author of Agile Hiring, discusses how much weight to give to skills match when evaluating a candidate.

Today Artima released ScalaTest 1.6.1 for Scala 2.9.0, which includes many enhancements over the previous ScalaTest release for Scala 2.9.0, including enhanced support for property-based testing, prettier output, and new style traits PropSpec and FreeSpec.

The highest complement you can deliver in the Python world is to say that something is "Pythonic" -- that it feels and fits into the Python way of thinking. I never imagined that a static language could feel this way, but Scala does -- and possibly even better.