Joel Spolsky writes about leaky abstractions. Abstractions leak when the underlying implementation shows through. A leaky abstractions that have always bothered me is moving from a small collection of objects to a database backed collection....

Charles Miller writes about user interfaces and the trend to put up klunky dialog boxes to confirm "dangerous" actions. The dialogs rarely stop anyone from making a mistake. Folks will just click on them automatically without thinking about them. I know I do. Charles writes: "Make your actions undo-able. Make your deletions un-deletable."...

I did a presentation on using Ruby at work last week. It is meant to be a quick intro into using Ruby, targeted mainly at Java Programmers. The talk was constrained to one hour so there are a lot of things that glossed over a bit. I expect to update the talk as time goes on, so feedback is welcome. You can find it here.

Wow, there were lots of responses to the LineNoise and PythonAndRuby postings last week. Here’s some of the feed back. On Line Noise First of all, let me remind everyone that a line noise score is for entertainment purposes only, and trying to derive something deep or serious about a language from its line noise score is counterproductive...

Recently there has been a spat of Ruby VS Python threads, both in ruby-talk and in comp.lang.python. I don’t recommend reading the threads, they are repetive, filled with misunderstandings (from both sides) and more personal attacks than technical content. However, one thing I have noticed is that Rubyists and Pythonistas bring different...

There is a thread on the ruby-talk list on puncuation as noise. Hal Fulton wrote a short program to analyze the symbol to puncuation ratio of a program and then compared the results on several programs in different languages. I did something similar a while back. A Java programmer had taken a look at Ruby and declare that he didn’t like all...

I was helping a friend in C++ the other day. While I religiously use a test framework in my day to day work (e.g. JUnit for Java or Test::Unit for Ruby), I haven’t used C++ for over three years and didn’t have C++ Unit handy. Then I remembered the C/C++ assert macro. We wrote a a series of small functions that looked something like...

Java’s checked exceptions are the type of thing that sound good at first glance, but have seriousl drawbacks in productions use. I was pleasantly surprised when Bruce Eckel echoed many of my observations in his checked exceptions essay. More recently, Anders Hejlsberg (the designer of the C# language) has weighed in with his opinions of...

I came across a reference to the elasiC language in a blog entry by Hans Nowak. Hans starts out his blog entry with this … elastiC. Quite an interesting language; Pythonic in many ways. At first glance, it seems to combine some good stuff from Python, Perl, Smalltalk, Lisp and C. … Ok, sounds interesting. I always enjoy new languages...

Finally, here is the write up on continuations and callcc that I’ve been promising. This has been a hard one to write. I had the basics written up about the same time as the KataTwoNoTail article, but I felt it needed some refinement. In a lot of ways, writing about and explaining continuations is a lot harder than actually using them...

Its the final day of the Ohio Java Software Symposium, the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference. I must be getting tired because the notes are much sketchier today. But there was still lots of good stuff. A Word on Organization The Saturday writeup mentioned a mixup with Hotel venues before the conference and may have left an impression that the...

It is Day 2 at the Ohio Java Software Symposium, otherwise known as the No Fluff, Just Stuff conference. Before we get into details of the conference, I have a story to share … A Flash-Back to the Week Before the Conference A week before the conference started, someone at work noticed that the nofluffjuststuff.com site gave directions to...

The Ohio Java Software Symposium version of the No Fluff Just Stuff conference has arrived in Cincinnati. I’ll try to capture a small part of what went on in this blog. Registration started at 12:00 noon on Friday (July 11) at the Mariott Northeast. I got there plenty early and had plenty of time to go through the material before the...

Previous Katas See the following writeups in this series KataTwoVariation1 KataTwoRecursive KataTwoCps In KataTwoCps we talked about passing continuations into functions. It turns out that continuations were just functions (we used Proc objects) that encapsulated the rest of the calculation to be performed. Using continuations allowed us...

Where Were We? KataTwoVariation1We explored an iterative solution using loop invariants. KataTwoRecursiveWe looked at two recursive solutions, one that passed array slices and one that passed explicit limits. In this posting, we are going to look at a few variations that play with something called Continuation Passing Style. Variation #4:...