A reader questioned my project-estimation technique in "Thinking in C++, Volume 1."

I've just finished reading "Java Puzzlers: Traps, Pitfalls, and Corner Cases" by Joshua Bloch and Neal Gafter (Addison Wesley, 2005).

The slides and audio from my presentation at the 2005 Python conference are now available.

Ian Bicking creates the first reasonable analysis (that I know of) between the two languages.

While experimenting to find a good introductory exercise for the PriorityQueue class, I discovered several anomalous results which I think produce a higher-order exercise in library design.

Mike Levin has posted another audio interview with me, which we recorded yesterday using Skype. It's about an hour long.

I've been working on this since the first post of this example; you can see that the code has been completely rewritten and (I think) greatly improved, both in terms of the generics and the performance tests themselves.

A few years ago, close on the heels of the dot-com bust, Rational basically imploded. IBM felt that there was still value in what was left of the company, and paid an exorbitant amount for the remains.

This entry is a replacement for "When Generics Fail" (which was deleted). In that, I began with casting solution, thinking that there wasn't a generic solution, then Krzysztof Sobolewski corrected me. So instead, I will compare the two solutions.

Their last update is almost a year ago.

A comment to an article by Craig Larman posted last year.

From discussions about the previous weblog entry, I've realized that Collection, Iterator (and Iterable) are all attempts to unify access to containers. Each has strengths and weaknesses, which is probably why we need more than one way to do it.

According to the Design Patterns book (aka GoF), the intent of the Iterator pattern is to "Provide a way to access the elements of an aggregate object sequentially without exposing its underlying representation." Or more simply, an iterator unifies access to containers.

For Thinking in Java 4e, I'm trying to analyze the presence of the Collections interface in java.util.

Ken Arnold just posted a blog entry describing how difficult he found generics when working on the upcoming edition of The Java Programming Language book.