http://www.artima.com/weblogs/index.jsp?blogger=bv Artima Weblogs is a community of bloggers posting on a wide range of topics of interest to software developers. http://www.artima.com/images/artima88x33.gif http://www.artima.com/ http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=223156 Tonight I released a new version of ScalaTest, which contains a few changes to you express assertions and a Suite discovery feature. This release contains all the features that I plan to have in version 1.0, so it is ready for a few months of beta testing. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=222678 Today I released a testing tool written in Scala, which can be used to test Scala or Java code. It is intended primarily as a tool for testing Scala code, but can also be used as a low-risk way to get started programming in Scala, by writing tests in Scala for production code written in Java. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=220890 This week we released an early access version of the book, Programming in Scala, in PDF form. With this work, Artima enters the world of book publishing for the first time. In this blog post, I explain what we did and why, and what this means for Artima in the future. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=211172 In my previous post I brought up the topic of code formatting. This time I'd like to bump it up a level of abstraction to the structure of the code itself. To what extent do you think teams should establish policies for code structure, and what do you think is the best way to structure flow in the presence of potential errors? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=210268 To what extent should a project or company have a coding style policy, and how and to what extent do you think it should be enforced? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=209353 To what extent does the productivity of dynamic languages come from the lack of typed variables versus the reduction in "finger typing" required when you don't have to declare the types? The technique of type inferencing in static languages may shed new light on this old debate. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=197511 For those of you who are programming in C#, what would you say are the biggest sources of pain, or at least discomfort, when using C#. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=196401 Every Python programmer I talk to seems pretty darn happy, but every language design requires tradeoffs. What are your Python pain points? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=195717 There has been much praise for Ruby in recent times, but all technologies make tradeoffs. What are the actual pain points you've experienced using Ruby? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=194961 There has been much discussion of proposed new features for Java in recent times, but what problems do those features need to address? What are your actual pain points today with Java? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=192686 In his RailConf keynote, Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson explained his reasoning for preferring numeric entity IDs in URLs as opposed strings. What's your opinion? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=191686 Java's checked exceptions sometimes force you to catch a checked exception that you believe will never be thrown. Best practice dictates that you wrap that in an unchecked exception and rethrow it, just in case. What exception class do you wrap with in that case? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=173229 The recent proposal to add closures to Java brought up some questions for me. How much more productive would I be with closures in Java? How much more fun would I have? http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=172586 Tonight we'll be upgrading the hardware that serves up Artima. In the future the site should scale better under heavy load, but tonight there will be some outage. We apologize in advance for the inconvenience. http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=172063 In his weblog, Cameron Purdy suggests that when a distributed system is designed as a multi-cellular organism rather than a collection of individual cells, an application need not deal with the potential for other servers to fail, but rather with it's own potential for failure.