Recently, at Devoxx, it was announced that Java would get lambda functions (a.k.a. anonymous functions or closures). There are many ways of implementing these on the JVM. This post proposes that reifying lambdas is a good choice.

The story of my visit to Poznan, Poland, for the RuPy 2009 conference. Also, a link to my talk slides/script.

An not-so-serious overview of the events in software development that led to the creation of Scala.

Using Scala to make your code lovely

A happy little voyage of discovery down the Groovy road.

Reducing accidental complexity in Scala

A short note about a task I am doing at my day job, involving making sure that different caches are cleared consistently. For people wondering about real-life use cases of metaprogramming techniques.

I finally bought a Dyson vacuum cleaner yesterday. It completely changes my cleaning experience. Design that asks and answers the right questions can completely change other experiences, too.

Windows 7 is here, and mysteriously, the Vista SP2 download has disappeared from windows update. What does this say about Vista that we didn't already know?

Some musings about my personal history with inheritance and interfaces, solicited by the release of the Go language this week.

Today I gave a presentation about ScalaTest at a local company. I showed ways ScalaTest integrates with JUnit and makes it easier to do some things that are harder to do with JUnit in Java. It made me curious to find out what JUnit users would say are their actual pain points today with JUnit.

I drove down to Boulder last weekend to participate in an open-spaces Python conference, speak at an eyes-forward programming conference, and attend a workshop on TurboGears 2. Here's what I learned.

In this blog, I attempt to answer a common question among Scala programmers: when would I opt to use an abstract type member instead of a generic type parameter in Scala API design?

I'm reading Po Bronson's "What Should I Do With My Life?" which is brilliant on many levels. For one thing, it's the anti-self-help book; it's just stories from talking to people, and by no means is everyone successful.

I will be giving the closing keynote at the Developer Day conference in Boulder, CO this coming Saturday, October 10. The goal of this conference is to be cheap and local, so I'm curious to see how it works.