The myth of functional language "purity" and marking side-effects in a programming language.

With the demise of my former employer, I found myself on the streets holding a sign that said: "Will do Jini for food." I finally landed a job with a company that does Jini, although I am not doing Jini. This entry is a reflective on what I learned about Java EE in that three month period.

XP2006 is over. Here's the first in a series of writeups about what happened.

While working on the Cat to MSIL compiler I ran into some very annoying security features.

The other day, I wrote a little testing tool for Java. It’s a simple little thing, just a set of classes that you can use with JUnit to make refactoring a little easier. When I was done, I looked at it and I realized that I’d made a bit of a mistake. I wrote the tool using Java 5.

Consider this a set of shameless self-promotional plugs: the Python 3000 travels around the world, and my Python blog is being translated into Chinese!

One commenter on my previous blog entry suggested that, because "Jini has recently been released by Sun as an ALV2 licensed opensource system. Thus, the door has opened for a whole new wave of distributed systems revolution."

Like so many of the "this will solve all your problems" technologies of the past, CORBA came riding in on the usual fanfare of "yes, finally, this is really the one!"

I have updated the documentation for Cat and released a new version of the interpreter.

The "Thinking in Java" conference was kind of a bust, sign-up wise. And I think I know why.

News about the Heron and Cat programming language, and what is on the horizon.

Namespace processing seems to be the 'will do later' entry on every XML toolkit author's list. Following from discussion in the recent thread "Simplifying XML Manipulation" I wanted to emphasise that namespaces are the key to reuse in schemas and hence any chance of rich data interchange. Don't ignore them!

I came across a web site that had tried to be a magazine and was clearly having trouble. I think all attempts to simply transfer the magazine format to a web site haven't worked as expected.

I couldn't find a thorough spec for the format called "unified diff" so I decided to research it. Here are my findings.

Looking at the Java Reflection API, we can learn some lessons about immutability.